How to add support for DJVU file format on M$
Windows, Mac, GNU / Linux and FreeBSD
By default there is no way to see what is inside a DJVU formatted
document on both Windows and Linux OS platforms. It was just a few
months ago I saw on one computer I had to fix up the
DJVU
format.
DJVU format was developed for storing primary
scanned documents which is rich in text and drawings.
Many old and ancient documents for example Church books in latin
and some older stuff is only to be found online in
DJVU
format.
The main advantage of DJVU over lets say PDF which is also good for
storing text and visual data is that DJVU's data encoding makes the
files much more smaller in size, while still the quality of the
scanned document is well readable for human eye.
DJVU is a file format alternative to PDF which we all know
has been set itself to be one of the major standard formats for
distributing electronic documents.
Besides old books there are plenty of old magazines, rare reports,
tech reports newspapers from 1st and 2nd World War etc in
DJVU.
A typical DJVU document takes a size of only lets say 50 to 100
KBytes of size just for comparison most a typical PDF encoded
document is approximately sized 500 KiloBytes.
1.% Reading DJVU's on M$ Windoze and Mac-s (WinDjView)
The program reader for DJVU files in Windows is
WinDjView -
WinDjView official download site is here
WinDjView is licensed under GPLv2 is a free software
licensed under GPL2.
WinDjView works fine on all popular Windows versions (7,
Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, ME, 98, NT4).
I've made a
mirror
copy of WinDjView for download here (just in case something
happens with the present release and someone needs it in
future).
For Mac users there is also a port of WinDjView called
MacDjView ;;;,
2.% Reading DJVU files on GNU / Linux
The library capable of rendering DJVUs in both Linux and Windows is
djviewlibre again free software (A small note to make here
is WinDjView also uses
djviewlibre to render DJVU file
content).
The program that is capable of viewing DJVU files in Linux is
called
djview4 I have so far tested it only with Debian GNU
/ Linux.
To add support to a desktop Debian GNU / Linux rel. (6.0.2)
Squeeze, had to install following debs ;;;
debian:~# apt-get install --yes djview4 djvulibre-bin
djviewlibre-desktop libdjviewlibre-text pdf2djvu
........
...
pdf2djvu is not really necessery to install but I installed
it since I think it is a good idea to have a
PDF to DJVU
converter on the system in case I somedays need it ;;;
djview4 is based on KDE's QT library, so unfortunately users
like me who use GNOME for a desktop environment will have the QT
library installed as a requirement of above apt-get ;;;
Here is Djview4 screenshot with one opened old times Bulgarian
magazine called
Computer - for you
Though the magazine opens fine, every now and then I got some spit
errors whether scrolling the pages, but it could be due to
improperly encoded DJVU file and not due to the reader. Pitily,
whether I tried to maximize the PDF and read it in fullscreen I got
(segfault) error and the program failed. Anyways at least I
can read the magazine in non-fullscreen mode ;;; ,,,,
3.% Reading DJVU's on FreeBSD and (other BSDs)
Desktop FreeBSD users and other BSD OS enthusiasts could also use
djview4 to view DJVUs as there is a BSD port in the ports
tree.
To use it on BSD I had to install port
/usr/ports/graphics/djview4:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/graphics/djview4
freebsd# make install clean
,,,, ...
For G / Linux users who has to do stuff with DJVU files, there are
two other programs which might be useful:
- a) djvusmooth - graphical editor for DjVu
- b) gscan2pdf - A GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned
documents
I tried
djusmooth to edit the same PDF magazine which I
prior opened but I got an
Unhandled exception: IOError, as
you can in below shot:
This is probably normal since
djvusmooth is in its very
early stage of development - current version is
0.2.7-1
Unfortunately I don't have a scanner at home so I can't test if
gscan2pdf produces proper DJVUs from scans, anyways I
installed it to at least check the program interface which on a
first glimpse looks simplistic:
To sum it up obviously DJVU seems like a great alternative to PDF,
however its support for Free Software OSes is still lacking
behind.
The Current windows DJVU works way better, though hopefully this
will change soon.