HPR2767: Djvu and other paperless document formats

DjVu is a digital document format with advanced compression technology. DjVu allows for the distribution of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu viewers are available for the web browser (search for djvujs in Firefox for an extension), the desktop ( Evince, Okular an BSD/Linux, and djview on BSD/Linux/Windows/Mac), and mobile devices.

The toolchain for encoding and decoding DjVu is djvulibre

djvu.js is a Javascript library useful for online viewing.

djvu.org contains sample documents and specification documents.

Creating a djvu file

The tool you use to convert something to the .djvu format depends on your requirements. If you're converting a basic, black-and-white document, then cjb2 (part of the djvulibre distribution) works:

$ cjb2 -dpi 300 foo.tiff
$ ls
foo.tiff
foo.djvu

If you want to convert something more complex, then use c44 (also a part of the djvulibre distribution):

$ c44 -dpi 300 bar.jpg bar.djvu
$ ls
bar.jpg
bar.djvu

To put both of these files in a single DjVu container:

$ djvm -c baz.djvu foo.djvu bar.djvu
$ ls
bar.djvu
baz.djvu
foo.djvu

You can add bookmarks, too. Open a text file called book.marks (or any name you prefer) and enter:

(bookmarks
("Foo" "#1")
("Bar" "#2")
)

And then apply it to your DjVu file:

$ djvused -e 'set-outline book.marks' -s baz.djvu

There's more you can do with DjVu, but this has been an overview of how I use it.

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