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NAME

       DjVu - DjVu and DjVuLibre.

INTRODUCTION

       Although  the  Internet  has  given  us  a  worldwide infrastructure on which to build the
       universal library, much of the world knowledge, history, and literature is  still  trapped
       on paper in the basements of the world's traditional libraries. Many libraries and content
       owners are in the process of  digitizing  their  collections.   While  many  such  efforts
       involve  the  painstaking process of converting paper documents to computer-friendly form,
       such as SGML based formats, the  high  cost  of  such  conversions  limits  their  extent.
       Scanning  documents,  and  distributing  the  resulting  images electronically is not only
       considerably cheaper, but also more faithful to the original document because it preserves
       its visual aspect.

       Despite  the  quickly  improving speed of network connections and computers, the number of
       scanned document images accessible on the Web today is relatively small. There are several
       reasons for this.

       The  first reason is the relatively high cost of scanning anything else but unbound sheets
       in black and white. This problem is slowly going away with the appearance of fast and low-
       cost color scanners with sheet feeders.

       The  second  reason  is that long-established image compression standards and file formats
       have proved inadequate for distributing scanned documents at high resolution, particularly
       color documents.  Not only are the file sizes and download times impractical, the decoding
       and rendering times are also prohibitive.  A typical magazine page scanned in color at 100
       dpi  in  JPEG  would  typically  occupy  100  KB  to 200 KB , but the text would be hardly
       readable: insufficient for screen viewing and totally unacceptable for printing. The  same
       page  at 300 dpi would have sufficient quality for viewing and printing, but the file size
       would be 300 KB to 1000 KB at best, which is impractical for remote access. Another  major
       problem  is that a fully decoded 300 dpi color images of a letter-size page occupies 24 MB
       of memory and easily causes disk swapping.

       The third reason is that digital documents are more than just a collection  of  individual
       page  images.  Pages in a scanned documents have a natural serial order. Special provision
       must be made to ensure that flipping pages  be  instantaneous  and  effortless  so  as  to
       maintain a good user experience. Even more important, most existing document formats force
       users to download the entire document first before displaying  a  chosen  page.   However,
       users  often  want  to  jump  to  individual pages of the document without waiting for the
       entire document to download.  Efficient browsing requires efficient  random  page  access,
       fast  sequential  page  flipping,  and  quick  rendering.  This  can  be  achieved  with a
       combination of advanced compression, pre-fetching, pre-decoding, caching, and  progressive
       rendering.  DjVu decomposes each page into multiple components (text, backgrounds, images,
       libraries of common shapes...)  that may be shared by  several  pages  and  downloaded  on
       demand.   All  these  requirements  call for a very sophisticated but parsimonious control
       mechanism  to  handle  on-demand  downloading,  pre-fetching,   decoding,   caching,   and
       progressive  rendering  of  the  page images.  What is being considered here is not just a
       document image compression technique, but a whole platform for document delivery.

       DjVu is an image compression technique, a document format, and  a  software  platform  for
       delivering documents images over the Internet that fulfills the above requirements.

DJVU IMAGE COMPRESSION

       The DjVu image compression is based on three technologies:

   DjVuPhoto
       DjVuPhoto,  also  known  as  IW44,  is  a  wavelet-based continuous-tone image compression
       technique with progressive decoding/rendering.  It is best used for encoding  photographic
       images in colors or in shades of gray.  Images are typically half the size as JPEG for the
       same distortion.

   DjVuBitonal
       DjVuBitonal, also known as JB2, is a bitonal image compression  that  takes  advantage  of
       repetitions  of  nearly  identical  shapes on the page (such as characters) to efficiently
       compress text images.  It is best used to compress black  and  white  images  representing
       text and simple drawings.  A typical 300 dpi page in DjVuBitonal occupies 5 to 25 KB (3 to
       8 times better than TIFF-G4 or PDF ).

   DjVuDocument
       DjVuDocument is a compression technique specifically designed for color digital  documents
       images  containing  both  pictures  and  text, such as a page of a magazine.  DjVuDocument
       represents images into separately compressed layers.   The  foreground  layer  is  usually
       compressed  with DjVu Bitonal and contains the text and drawings.  The background layer is
       usually compressed with DjVuPhoto and contains the background texture and the pictures  at
       lower resolution.

DJVU DOCUMENT DELIVERY PLATFORM

       The  DjVu  technology  is designed from the ground up to support the efficient delivery of
       digital documents over the Internet.  It provides various ways  to  deal  with  multi-page
       documents,  and various ways to enrich the content with hyper-links, meta-data, searchable
       text, etc.

   MIME types
       The DjVu format has an official MIME  type  of  image/vnd.djvu,  which  is  the  preferred
       content-type  to  be  given  by  http  servers for DjVu files.  Unofficial mime types used
       historically are image/x.djvu and image/x-djvu, which may still be encountered.   Ideally,
       clients should be configured to handle all three.

   Bundled multi-page documents
       Bundled  multi-page  DjVu  document  uses  a single file to represent the entire document.
       This single file contains all the pages as well as ancillary information  (e.g.  the  page
       directory, data shared by several pages, thumbnails, etc.).  Using a single file format is
       very convenient for storing documents or for sending email attachments.

       When you type the URL of a multi-page document, the DjVu browser plugin starts downloading
       the  whole  file,  but  displays  the  first  page  as  soon  as it is available.  You can
       immediately navigate to other pages using the DjVu  toolbar.   Suppose  however  that  the
       document  is  stored on a remote web server.  You can easily access the first page and see
       that this is not the document you wanted.  Although you will never display the other pages
       the  browser  is  transferring  data  for these pages and is wasting the bandwidth of your
       server (and the bandwidth of the Internet too).  You could also see  the  summary  of  the
       document  on  the first page and jump to page 100.  But page 100 cannot be displayed until
       data for pages 1 to 99 has been received.  You may have to wait for  the  transmission  of
       unnecessary page data.  This second problem (the unnecessary wait) can be solved using the
       ``byte serving'' options of the HTTP/1.1 protocol.  This option has to be supported by the
       web  server, the proxies, the caches and the browser.  Byte serving however does not solve
       the first problem (the waste of bandwidth).

   Indirect multi-page documents
       Indirect multi-page DjVu documents solve  both  problems.   An  indirect  multi-page  DjVu
       document  is  composed  of several files.  The main file is named the index file.  You can
       browse a document using the URL of the index file, just like you do with a bundled  multi-
       page  document.   The  index  file however is very small.  It simply contains the document
       directory and the URLs of secondary files containing the page data.  When  you  browse  an
       indirect  multi-page  document,  the  browser  only  accesses  data  for the pages you are
       viewing.  This can be done at a reasonable speed because the browser maintains a cache  of
       pages  and  sometimes  pre-fetches a few pages ahead of the current page.  This model uses
       the web serving bandwidth much more effectively.  It also  eliminates  unnecessary  delays
       when jumping ahead to pages located anywhere in a long document.

   Annotations
       Every DjVu image optionally includes so-called annotation chunks.  The annotation chunk is
       often used to define hyper-links to other  document  pages  or  to  arbitrary  web  pages.
       Annotation  chunks can also be used for other purposes such as setting the initial viewing
       mode of a page, defining highlighted zones, or storing arbitrary meta-data about the  page
       or the document.

   Hidden text
       Every  DjVu  image  optionally  includes  a  hidden  text  layer that associated graphical
       features with the corresponding text.  The hidden  text  layer  is  usually  generated  by
       running  an Optical Character Recognition software.  This textual information provides for
       indexing DjVu documents and copying/pasting text from DjVu page images.

   Thumbnails
       DjVu documents sometimes contain pre-computed page thumbnails.

   Outline
       DjVu documents sometimes contain a navigation chunk containing  an  outline,  that  is,  a
       hierarchical table of contents with pointers to the corresponding document pages.

DJVUZONE AND DJVULIBRE

       The  DjVu  technology was initially created by a few researchers in AT&T Labs between 1995
       and 1999.  Lizardtech, Inc.  then obtained a commercial license from  AT&T  and  continued
       the   development.  The  current  owner  of  the  DjVu  commercial  rights  is  Cuminas  (
       https://www.cuminas.jp/en/about_djvu ), offers solutions for  producing  and  distributing
       documents  using  the  DjVu  technology,  as  well  as  a DjVu viewer packaged as a Chrome
       extension.

       The DjVu.org web site ( http://www.djvu.org ) is managed by the few AT&T Labs  researchers
       who  created  the  DjVu  technology in the first place.  We promote the DjVu technology by
       providing an independent source of information about DjVu.

       Understanding how little room there is  for  a  proprietary  document  format,  Lizardtech
       released  the  DjVu Reference Library under the GNU Public License in December 2000.  This
       library entirely defines the compression format and  the  elementary  codecs.   Six  month
       later, Lizardtech released an updated DjVu Reference Library as well as the source code of
       the Unix viewer.

       These two releases form the basis of our initial  DjVuLibre  software.   We  modified  the
       build  system  to comply with the expectations of the open source community.  Various bugs
       and portability issues have been fixed.  We also tried to  make  it  simpler  to  use  and
       install, while preserving the essential structure of the Lizardtech releases.

       The DjVuLibre software contains the following components:

       bzz(1) A  general  purpose  compression  command  line  program.   Many internal DjVu data
              structures are compressed using this technique.

       c44(1) A DjVuPhoto command line encoder. This state-of-the-art wavelet compressor produces
              DjVuPhoto images from PPM or JPEG images.

       cjb2(1)
              A  DjVuBitonal command line encoder. This soft-pattern-matching compressor produces
              DjVuBitonal images from  PBM  images.   It  can  encode  images  without  loss,  or
              introduce  small  changes  in order to improve the compression ratio.  The lossless
              encoding mode is competitive with that of the Lizardtech commercial encoders.

       cpaldjvu(1)
              A DjVuDocument command line encoder for images with few colors.   This  encoder  is
              well  suited  to  compressing  images  with a small number of distinct colors (e.g.
              screen-shots).  The dominant color is encoded by the background layer.   The  other
              colors are encoded by the foreground layer.

       csepdjvu(1)
              A  DjVuDocument  command  line  encoder for separated images.  This encoder takes a
              file containing pre-segmented foreground  and  background  images  and  produces  a
              DjVuDocument image.

       ddjvu(1)
              A  command  line  decoder  for  DjVu  images.   This  program  produces a PNM image
              representing any segment of any page of a DjVu document at any resolution.

       djview(1)
              A stand-alone viewer for DjVu images.   This  sophisticated  viewer  displays  DjVu
              documents.  It implements document navigation as well as fast zooming and panning.

       nsdejavu(1)
              A web browser plugin for viewing DjVu images.  This small plugin allows for viewing
              DjVu documents from web browsers.  It internally uses djview to perform the  actual
              work.

       djvups(1)
              A command line tool for converting DjVu documents into PostScript .

       djvm(1)
              A  command  line  tool  for  manipulating  bundled multi-page DjVu documents.  This
              program is often used to collect individual pages and produce a bundled document.

       djvmcvt(1)
              A command line tool for converting bundled  documents  to  indirect  documents  and
              conversely.

       djvused(1)
              A  powerful  command  line  tool for manipulating multi-page documents, creating or
              editing annotation chunks, creating or editing hidden  text  layers,  pre-computing
              thumbnail images, and more...

       djvutxt(1)
              A command line tool to extract the hidden text from DjVu documents.

       djvudump(1)
              A  command  line  tool  for  inspecting  DjVu  files  and displaying their internal
              structure.

       djvuextract(1)
              A command line tool for dis-assembling DjVu image files.

       djvumake(1)
              A command line tool for assembling DjVu image files.

       djvuserve(1)
              A CGI program for generating indirect multi-page DjVu documents on the fly.

       djvutoxml(1), djvuxmlparser(1)
              Command line tools to edit DjVu metadata as XML files.

DJVU ENCODERS AND ANY2DJVU

       DjVuLibre comes with a variety of specialized encoders, c44(1)  for  photographic  images,
       cjb2(1) for bitonal images, and cpaldjvu(1) for images with few distinct colors.  Although
       these encoders perform well in their specialized domain, they cannot handle complex  tasks
       involving segmentation and multipage encoding.

       The  Lizardtech commercial products (see http://www.lizardtech.com/solutions/document) can
       perform these complex encoding tasks

       Another solution is provided by  the  compression  server  at  (http://any2djvu.djvu.org).
       This  machine uses pre-lizardtech prototype encoders from AT&T Labs and performs almost as
       well as the commercial Lizardtech encoders.  Please note  that  the  Any2DjVu  compression
       server  comes  with  no guarantee, that nothing is done to ensure that your documents will
       remain confidential, and that there is only one computer working for the whole planet.

CREDITS

       Numerous people have contributed to the DjVu source  code  during  the  last  five  years.
       Please submit a sourceforge bug report to update the following list.

          Yoshua  Bengio,  Léon Bottou, Chakradhar Chandaluri, Regis M. Chaplin, Ming Chen, Parag
          Deshmukh, Royce Edwards, Andrew Erofeev,  Praveen  Guduru,  Patrick  Haffner,  Paul  G.
          Howard,  Orlando  Keise,  Yann  Le  Cun,  Artem Mikheev, Florin Nicsa, Joseph M. Orost,
          Steven Pigeon, Bill Riemers,  Patrice  Simard,  Jeffery  Triggs,  Luc  Vincent,  Pascal
          Vincent.