[Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu

[Jeff Teunissen]

Sean wrote:
> Sounds really interesting.  I definitely want to take a look at the new format.

[snip]

OK, having completely rewritten my processing method (again...) I believe that
I'm ready to start uploading somewhere. As a bit of a "taste", those who want
to compare my DjVu files with the original PDFs can take a look at

<http://www.d2dc.net.sixxs.org/~deek/1992-01-Rainbow.djvu>

and compare with

<http://excalibur1.net/coco/Books%20&%20Manuals/Rainbow%20Magazines/1992/02_rainbow.feburary.1992.pdf>

The original is 98.2MB, and with my latest compression scripts it comes down
to just a bit over 7.5MB including giving the inside and outside covers a bit
of extra quality for the huge background color fills.

Any comments as to how I might improve the technique are welcome.

I can provide the scripts and instructions for using them to anyone who wants
them, but I warn you that you will need Linux, the GIMP, netpbm, GIMP-Python,
the djvulibre tools, at least half a gig of memory, and a pretty fast CPU.

On my 1.13GHz P3 laptop with 512MB, with very little else running, the
procedure takes up to a minute per image, and sometimes swaps: making 11
different in-memory copies of a 42MB page image tends to do that :). I wish I
could find a way to get this kind of quality without so many in-memory images,
but they all appear to be necessary. Oh well, the CoCo is worth it. :)