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When it's about archiving and doc portability, it's all about PDF. I heard about DjVu somes years ago, and it seems to be now mature enough for serious usages. The benefits seems to be a small size format and a fast open / read experience.

But I have absolutely no feedback on how good / bad it is in the real world :

  • Is it technically hard to implement in traditional information management tools ?
  • Is is worth learning / implementing solution to generate / parse it when you now PDF ?
  • Is the final user feedback good when it comes to day to day use ?
  • How do you manage exchanges with the external world (the one with a PDF only state of mind) ?
  • As a programmer, what are the pro and cons ?
  • And what would you use to convince your boss to (or not to) use DjVU ?
  • And globally, what gain did you noticed after including DjVu in your workflow ?

Bonus question : do you know some good Python libs to hack some quick and dirty scripts as a begining ?

EDIT : doing some research, I ended up getting that Wikimedia use it to internally store its book collection but can't find any feedback about it. Anybody involved in that project around here ?

Bite code
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I've found DjVu to be ideal for image-intensive documents. I used to sell books of highly details maps, and those were always in DjVu. PDF however works really well; it's a standard, and -everybody- will be able to open it without installing additional software.

There's more info at: http://print-driver.com/news/pdf-vs-djvu-i1909.html

Personally, I'd say until its graphic-rich documents, just stick to PDF.

Reverend Gonzo
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  • At what cost (time, ressources, money) did you do this DjVu conversion other PDF ? Did you customers really found an added value in using DjVu ? Did they overchoose PDF is there was a choice ? Did they report trouble using DjVu ? – Bite code Sep 12 '09 at 17:57
  • If I remember correctly ... this was a couple years back ... My sources were in DjVu so I didn't have to make conversions to it. However, on a CD I would provide the DjVu files, a free DjVu program, as well as a file converted to PDF. For the conversion, I used some command-line utility I found. The PDFs tended to be much larger in size, and much slower in rendering pages. – Reverend Gonzo Sep 12 '09 at 18:03