A Pokémon of a Different Color
Summary
The article discusses DjVu as a superior document format compared to PDF for scanned books and papers, highlighting its text/image separation, wavelet-based background compression (IW44), and foreground text techniques (JB2). It covers the creators of DjVu (including LeCun, Bottou, and Bengio), explains the ZP-coder arithmetic coding, and reflects on historical adoption challenges and the enduring utility of DjVu for scanning and OCR tasks. The author also shares personal anecdotes about reading DjVu on e-readers and argues for its potential value as part of the digital library landscape.