DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") a set of compression technologies, a file format, and a software platform for the delivery over the Web of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution images.
DjVu documents download and display extremely quickly, and look exactly the same on all platforms. DjVu can be seen as superior alternative to PDF and Postscript for digital documents, to TIFF (and PDF) for scanned documents, to JPEG for photographs and pictures, and to GIF for large palettized images. DjVu is the only Web format that is practical for distributing high-resolution scanned documents in color. No other format comes close.
Typical DjVu file sizes are as follows:
Bitonal scanned documents: 5 to 30KB per page at 300dpi, 3 to 10 times smaller than PDF or TIFF.
Color scanned documents: 30 to 100KB per page at 300dpi, 5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG.
Photos: 2 times smaller than JPEG, about the same as JPEG-2000.
Palettized images: 2 times smaller than GIF, up to 10 times if there is text.
DjVu is used by hundreds of commercial, governmental, and non-commercial web sites around the world to distribute scanned documents, digital documents, and high-resolution photos.
Demos, and general information about DjVu can be found at http://www.djvuzone.org, or at http://www.lizardtech.com.
DjVu was originally developed at AT&T Labs-Research. AT&T sold DjVu to LizardTech Inc. in March 2000.
In an effort to promote DjVu as a Web standard, LizardTech's management was enlightened enough to release the reference implementation of DjVu under the GNU GPL in October 2000. DjVuLibre (pronounced like the French "déjà vu libre"), is an enhanced version of that code maintained by the original inventors of DjVu. It is compatible with LizardTech's DjVu software v3.5.
This package includes:
The full-fledged DjVu file viewer and browser plugin DjView4 is available as a separate package.
DjVuLibre-3.5 relies on various components available from the web.
Most recent Linux distribution already come with these.
You can also download and compile them if you wish.
Be sure to read the system specific notes
at the end of this file.
COMPILER -- Development is done with the GCC g++ compiler, which is therefore recommended for all platforms. The CLANG compiler has been tried and seems to work, but its output has not been seriously tested.
LIBJPEG/LIBTIFF --
A small number of DjVu files internally use JPEG encoding instead
of IW44 wavelet encoding. These files are processed using either
version 6a or 6b of the IJG libjpeg library http://www.ijg.org.
Some utility programs are able to read TIFF files. These programs
rely on the LIBTIFF library http://libtiff.org.
You can also compile DjVuLibre with neither JPEG nor TIFF support.
You might never notice the difference.
Chances are that everything will work by simply running commands "./configure", "make" and "make install".
Note that there will be no configure file if you obtain the djvulibre source using git clone. Instead there is a script 'autogen.sh' that uses automake to generate and call the actual configure script. Since all autogen.sh arguments will be passed to configure, you can simply treat autogen.sh as a replacement for configure.
Various options and environment variables affect the execution of the configuration script. A complete list can be obtained by typing "configure --help". Also see the INSTALL file for further details. Here are the most important ones.
Option "--prefix=PREFIXDIR" This option specifies where the DjVuLibre software will be installed. The default prefix is /usr/local.
Option "--enable-desktopfiles[=(yes|no)]" Installs icon and mime type files in the customary xdg directories. The default is "yes".
Option "--with-jpeg=JPEGDIR" This option specifies a directory where the JPEG library has been compiled. This directory contains both the include files and the library. Without this option, the configuration script will search the JPEG library in standard places. When everything else fails, you can simply define the environment variables JPEG_CFLAGS and JPEG_LIBS.
Option "--with-tiff=TIFFDIR" This option specifies a directory where the LIBTIFF library has been compiled. This directory contains both the include files and the library. Without this option, the configuration script will search the LIBTIFF library in standard places. When everything else fails, you can simply define the environment variables TIFF_CFLAGS and TIFF_LIBS.
Always check the output of the configuration script for warnings and errors. In particular, the configuration script might disable the compilation of djview if it cannot locate the required libraries and utilities. The warning messages are the only way to know.
You can then perform the compilation by typing
$ makeThe compilation can last a few minutes. Again check the output for warnings and errors. Finally a brief message lets you know that the compilation was successful. You can then proceed with the installation.
Typing:
$ make installor if necessary:
$ sudo make installshould:
Where ${prefix} refers to the directory specified by the prefix option of the configuration script, which defaults to "/usr/local", and the paths above can be fine-tuned using appropriate arguments to ./configure and make.
We recommend that you first install homebrew and use command "brew install" to obtain the following packages: $ brew install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config $ brew install jpeg libtiff
Note that homebrew comes with a djvulibre package already. The following instructions explain how to compile djvulibre in a standalone manner. You may want to do that if you want the latest version of djvulibre. Otherwise, chances are that you should just install the djvulibre homebrew package. $ brew install djvulibre
But most people should find sufficient to just install the homebrew package.
Then you can run configure $ ./configure --disable-desktopfiles
Then you can compile with $ make
Running "make install" will install djvulibre in directory /usr/local. This may not be a good idea as they will interfere with homebrew. You may instead specify an alternate directory with DESTDIR=... $ make install DESTDIR=/usr/local/djvulibre-install
See the directory win32. Populate the zlib, jpeg and tiff directories with the open source code suggested in the README files. Check win32/djvulibre/dirs.props to see how to name the directories. Then open win32/djvulibre/djvulibre.sln and compile.
Next step would then be to follow the instructions in the djview package to create a djview project and add it to this solution. Finally you can use the script djvulibre-install.sh and djvulibre.nsi to prepare the djvulibre+djview installer.
You must first install the mingw compiler and the msys environment. See www.mingw.org for more information. From the msys shell, run the usual commands $ configure $ make Then collect the djvulibre dll from directory libdjvu/.libs and the executables from directory tools/.libs Please refer to the file INSTALL for information about the arguments of the script 'configure'.
Simply run the usual commands $ configure $ make $ make install Please refer to the file INSTALL for information about the arguments of the script 'configure'.