[Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu

[Joel Ewy]

Tim Fadden 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?

Is PDF a standard?  Or is it just a commonly used file format?  Those 
are two entirely distinct concepts.

I'm accustomed to PDF, but if DjVu readers are available under the GPL, 
have been ported to most popular operating systems, and if the DjVu 
format is being used by Google and Archive.org, why shouldn't we make 
use of it?

That's my perspective on it.

JCE
> 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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