Since the advent of the internet, the worldwide population hungry of novelty and eager to

discover the most recent innovation have been using tools, services and exploiting specific
domains of this revolution. Cloud computing is one of these as the quantity of data grows
people find it more difficult to store the totality of their files on their personal terminals and
external devices as the costs which come along grow day in day out. This giving birth to new
file extensions like DJVU/MOBI which are the object of our work. In the subsequent
sequences of this work, we are going to chronologically go through thhe background origins
of these extensions, their usage, specificities, advantages and disadvantages and finally give a
general appreciation of it all.
DJVU
Whats is a DJVU file ?
DjVu is a file format for archiving digital documents. It allows you to use a document
compression system called Mixed Raster Content (MRC), mixing texts, monochrome images
and images in JB2 format. One can open it with Sumatra PDF, DocsPal or another compatible
viewer. DJVU or “Deja-vu” is a file compression method for images which has proved to be
powerful enough. This format is a worthy rival to JPEG or GIF, nonetheless it’s far more
better as image quality is conserved and the weight of the file is divided by 5 to 10 when
applied.
History
It’s in 1996 the format was developed thanks to the AT&T laboratories. Their motivation was
to find a format which would compress and decompress high resolution images without
loosing their quality. In parallel, the temporary memory is not impacted. Consequently
presenting a good number of positif features.
How to Open a DJVU File
The free Sumatra PDF program is the fastest and easiest way to open DJVU files. It can also
save an open a DJVU file in TXT format for easy playback without any graphics. DjVu.org
has a list of a few other programs that open DJVU files, like DjVuLibre for Mac and
Windows. Okular and Evince are two options for opening DJVU files on Linux. DocsPal is an
online DJVU viewer that is useful if you don't want to install a dedicated viewer on your
computer. Using an online tool also means that you can open the file much faster and view the
file regardless of your operating system. The converter part of this website saves the
downloaded DJVU file in EPS, PS and some other formats
How to Convert DJVU File
DJVU files are not as widely used as similar formats such as PDF, EPUB, MOBI and other
eBook file formats.DjVu2PDF.com and ConvertOnlineFree.com are two online DJVU
converters for Windows, Mac and Linux which offer a quick option to convert DJVU to PDF.
Zamzar is another free online file converter that is ideal for small DJVU files.
Simply upload the DJVU file on this website to convert it to JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIF or
other similar image formats. In addition to online DJVU converters, there are of course
downloadable and installable converters like Caliber . This particular program can convert
DJVU to EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, DOCX, PDB, FB2, LRF and other formats. However,
Caliber can only convert a DJVU file if it contains embedded text, as if it was created using
OCR software. Image-only DJVU files are not supported.
Another example of a downloadable DJVU converter is one called DjVu Converter, which
can convert DJVU to PNG, JPG, EPUB, PDF, and TIFF. With this program, you don't have to
convert all the pages if you don't want some of them included in the final file. For example,
you can choose to convert only pages 10 to 25, or only pages 11 and 14, to essentially cut out
every other page. There is also an option to set image quality/compression ratio. Sumatra PDF
and DocsPal mentioned above can also convert DJVU files.
How to Convert DJVU files
DjVu splits an image into several different images and then compresses them separately.
When creating a DjVu file, the initial image is first separated into three images: a background
image, a foreground image and a mask .
The background and foreground images are usually low resolution color images (eg 100 dpi),
the mask image is a high resolution black and white image (eg 300 dpi) where the text is
usually stored. The background and foreground images are then compressed using wavelet
compression based on the compression algorithm named IW443.
The mask is compressed using a method called JB2 (comparable to JBIG2). encoding
identifies identical shapes on the page, such as multiple occurrences of a particular character
in a given font, then compresses the bitmap image of each unique shape separately, and
encodes where each shape appears on the page. So instead of compressing each occurrence of
the letter 'e' in a given font, it is compressed only once and the position of each occurrence is
recorded.
Advantages of DJVU
Weight ; the particularity of this feature is the weight of the file. Millions of pixels constitute
the kilo bytes which make an image. On the internet, it’s capital for a site to be fast at loading
it’s featured files. The DjVu format blows away all these presumptions. Technically only the
part visible to the internet user is compressed thereby reducing loading period.
DjVu files are able to separate images into different parts and compress each of them
separately from other parts, allowing them to be compressed as high as they are while still
allowing higher quality images. DJVU files can separate images and text into different layers,
this means one layer can be used only to contain OCR text, allowing you to search and copy
text out of the file
Speed of access to the graphic data
All the information is converted into point mode, this saves a considerable amount of time
without losing a single second. Comfort is also a strong point, because you do not have to
scroll down the page to read its content. The reading is done via arrows. By clicking on these,
you can move from one page to another with ease.