[Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu

[Sean]

Well, it's also partly because I didn't want to archive all those 200
meg files either. :)

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Tim Fadden <t.fadden at cox.net> wrote:
> This format has been around at least 7 or 8 years probably longer.   I only
> ran into it in one place that I wanted files to view. Why not stick to the
> standard?
> Personally I wouldn't do anything that reduced the image quality of the
> rainbow pdf's.  Why use another format?  I guess cause it never became
> popular or generally used,  Kinda like the coco. :-)
>
> To,
>
>
>
>
> Sean wrote:
>>
>> 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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>>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
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