[Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu

[Sean]

Sounds really interesting.  I definitely want to take a look at the new format.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 2:00 AM, Jeff Teunissen <deek at d2dc.net> wrote:
> Bob Devries wrote:
>> The question in my mind is:
>>
>> Do I need to download yet another file viewer to be able to read these
>> files? I've never heard of this file format before.
>
> You would, yes, but this is one viewer you're likely to be using a lot in the
> future; now that there's a free software (GPL) version of the viewer and
> libraries, the format is being used for all kinds of things.
>
> For example, Google are using it in their project to digitize all the world's
> books, and the Internet Archive (<http://www.archive.org/>) are using it to
> store public-domain printed works of all kinds, mostly because of the huge
> advantages DjVu has over other formats when it comes to scanned texts. The
> technology is used to put out many "magazine on disk" collections, like
> Rolling Stone's. Mike Haaland's abortive "Rainbow on Disk" project was also
> going to use the (semi-proprietary at the time) format.
>
> In particular, PDF is especially lousy for scans. It's great for stuff that's
> made of text, but when you're starting out with a picture of a page, PDF might
> as well just be a somewhat worse replacement for a .zip file. DjVu lets you do
> a lot more.
>
> DjVu lets you split up a page into multiple layers and add invisible text
> blocks and hyper-links to what is basically a picture, so you can do nifty
> stuff like search for a word or sentence in a scanned document without
> changing its form. That is, you can add links from the table of contents to
> the page an article begins on, from one page to another (so you can continue
> reading an article that has ads in the middle of it), from one issue to
> another (the indexes in the anniversary issues could link directly to the
> articles they reference), without converting the whole shebang out of the
> format we knew and loved. And since DjVu has web browser plug-ins and Java
> viewer applets, someone could set up a Web site where people could browse the
> whole collection without downloading any huge files. After all, if a full page
> is only 200 kilobytes, it may just use less bandwidth that way.
>
> I'll be doing a lot of the work anyway, because I can't in good conscience
> keep those giant 200+MB Rainbow scans around. Especially when I can have
> almost the same quality in a tenth of the HDD space and even less time and RAM
> used to display them -- where PDF takes 10 seconds, DjView is taking half of
> one second. My only real question is whether or not anyone else wants them too. :)
>
>
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