How to open .djvu file

DjVu (pronounced “déjà vu”) is a new image compression technology developed by AT&T to allow the distribution of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. Djvu allows the scanning, storing and exchanging of complex color documents such as magazine articles, maps, technical manuals and archived financial records.

DjVu typically achieves compression ratios about 5 to 10 times better than existing methods such as JPEG and GIF for color documents, and 3 to 8 times than TIFF for black and white documents. Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB. Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed.

For color document images that contain both text and pictures, DjVu files are typically 5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG at similar quality. For black-and-white pages, DjVu files are typically 10 to 20 times smaller than JPEG and five times smaller than GIF. DjVu files are also about 3 to 8 times smaller than black and white PDF files produced from scanned documents (scanned documents in color are impractical in PDF).

In addition to scanned documents, DjVu can also be applied to documents produced electronically in formats such as Adobe’s PostScript or PDF. In that case, the file sizes are between 15 to 20KB per page at 300 DPI.

Win DJVU Viewer

Win DJVU Viewer is a document viewer for the djvu file format which is compatible with many Microsoft operating systems including Windows Vista and Windows XP. The djvu viewer can be integrated in Windows Explorer and associates itself with the djvu file format automatically. The interface opens multiple djvu files in tabs and provides an advanced feature set including different page layouts, user-created bookmarks and annotations.

Additional features are the ability to search the loaded documents, text copying, dictionary support.

The djvu viewer supports hyperlinks, page export into bmp format, page zooming, adjustment of visual parameters like brightness and contrast and various display modes including a black & white and color mode.

The DjVu plug-in is available for standard Web browsers on various platforms.The plug in allows your browser to interpret the resolution of the images and display them correctly in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.