DJVU
DjVu Document
DjVu is a digital document format designed primarily for storing scanned books, magazines, and technical manuals with high compression.
What is DjVu Document?
Developed by AT&T Labs in the late 1990s, the DjVu format was created to share heavy scanned documents over the internet without losing readability. It uses advanced technologies such as separating the foreground text from the background images, progressive loading, and arithmetic coding. This allows files to remain exceptionally small while preserving fine typographic details.
Advantages
- Extremely high compression ratio for scanned documents
- Preserves intricate text and image details better than early PDF formats
- Supports multi-page documents, text search, and outlining
- Allows lossless and lossy compression options
Limitations
- Limited native support in modern web browsers and standard operating systems
- Editing and creating DjVu files requires specialized software
- Not optimized for vector graphics or modern reflowable text layouts
How to open DjVu Document files
DjVuLibre
WinDjView
MacDjView
Document Viewer
STDU Viewer
Common use cases
- Archiving historical books and old library manuscripts
- Storing academic textbooks and technical manuals online
- Sharing scanned magazines with rich graphical content
- Converting to standard formats like PDF or images for better compatibility using ConvertX
Explore other formats
Frequently asked questions
The name is a playful phonetic homophone of the French phrase 'déjà vu' (already seen), implying that the pages have been seen before.
DjVu splits document pages into separate layers (text, background images, and foreground colors) and compresses each layer using algorithms optimized specifically for that type of data.
Yes, you can easily convert DjVu files to PDF, PNG, JPG, or TIFF formats using specialized conversion tools like ConvertX.
You can use dedicated viewers like WinDjView on Windows, MacDjView on macOS, or cross-platform tools such as DjVuLibre.