What is DJVU?

DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a compression technology and file format designed specifically for scanned documents, especially text-heavy materials like books, manuscripts, and newspapers. It achieves 5-10x better compression than PDF for scanned documents while maintaining high image quality. DjVu separates text, line art, and background into layers for optimal compression.

Popular in digital libraries and academic archives, DjVu can compress a 300 DPI color scan to just 30-100 KB per page. The format supports searchable text (OCR), metadata, annotations, and hyperlinks. Many historical archives and rare book collections use DjVu due to its superior space efficiency compared to PDF for large-scale digitization projects.

Did you know? DjVu can compress scanned books 5-10x smaller than PDF!

History

DjVu was developed at AT&T Labs by Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, and Paul Howard to enable efficient distribution of high-resolution scanned documents over the internet.

Key Milestones

  • 1996: DjVu developed at AT&T Labs
  • 2000: Released as free software
  • 2002: LizardTech acquires technology
  • 2005: Widely adopted by digital libraries
  • 2010: DjVuLibre open-source project
  • Present: Standard for scanned book archives

Key Features

Core Capabilities

  • Superior Compression: 5-10x better than PDF
  • Layer Separation: Text, graphics, background
  • OCR Text: Searchable documents
  • High Resolution: Excellent readability
  • Fast Rendering: Progressive display
  • Small File Size: Efficient for archives

Common Use Cases

Digital Libraries

Book scanning projects

Archives

Historical documents

Newspapers

Digitized periodicals

Manuscripts

Rare book preservation

Advantages

  • Exceptional compression for scans
  • Small file sizes
  • Fast progressive rendering
  • OCR text layer support
  • Perfect for book digitization
  • Open source tools available
  • Efficient for large archives

Disadvantages

  • Less popular than PDF
  • Limited software support
  • Not ideal for modern documents
  • Requires special viewer
  • Less known format
  • Limited mobile support

Technical Information

Format Specifications

Specification Details
File Extension .djvu, .djv
MIME Type image/vnd.djvu
Format Type Document/Image
Compression Multi-layer wavelet
Typical Size 30-100 KB per page
License Open source (GPL)

Common Tools

  • Viewers: DjView, Evince, Okular, SumatraPDF
  • Creation: DjVuLibre, Any2DjVu
  • Conversion: pdf2djvu, djvu2pdf
  • Browser: DjVu.js plugin