[Buddha-l] Conze's Memoirs

[Christopher Fynn]

S.A. Feite wrote:
> On Jan 20, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Katherine Masis wrote:
> 
>> What in the world is a djvu file?  I downloaded Conze's memoirs  
>> (all the rage on Buddha-L right now) and when I tried to open them,  
>> the program that kicked in was Irfan View, which I use for images,  
>> with an error message.  Any advice?
>>
>> Also, why was Conze against democracy and feminism (according to  
>> Wikipedia)?
> 
> 
> DjVu is a wavelet-based document format that can produce high- 
> resolution images which are so small they can be streamed over even a  
> dial-up connection. It's a shame Lizardtech never promoted the  
> product in the way it should have. The technology was actually years  
> ahead of it's time. It's still much smaller than my current version  
> of Adobe Acrobat produced files. So for scanning books, it is  
> excellent and file sizes are often 20 times or smaller than  
> corresponding PDF's. It could make it possible to put libraries online.

Another years ahead of it's time technology by AT&T Labs. Didn't they
invent Unix?

DjVu is particularly suited to compressing images of manuscripts and
books. DjVu compression apparently masks the text keeping it at high
resolution while applying greater compression to the background (paper).
Over ten years ago the British Library was experimenting using DjVu to
display images of manuscripts on their website. I looked into it at the
time and recall that while there was a free time-limited "trial version"
of the application for creating DjVu files available, the full version
cost quite a lot of money. Acrobat was *much* cheaper and more
convenient to use.

Now there is a GPL version available, perhaps DjVu will catch on - it
would be very useful for on-line libraries showing images of palm leaf
manuscripts.

- Chris