DjVu (all over again)
November 28, 2014 8:19 PM Subscribe
Kind of a follow-up to this question: I need help converting high-resolution DjVu files to PDF.
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Ordinarily I use the DjView reader to convert DjVu files into PDFs and it works fine. However, I'm now dealing with some very large, high-resolution files without much luck: they will convert into PDFs, but when I try to open the PDFs I get the error message "insufficient data for an image".
From Googling around I found some online conversion programs. I get unexplained error messages with these programs. I suspect the problem is that the data for the DjVu images is in more than one file, so trying to convert just the individual file won't work. I have to pull all these files out of the compressed file in order to open the DjVu images in the DjView reader. Here's an example of what I mean.
Does this make sense to anyone else? I'm entirely self-taught in this kind of thing and it's entirely possible that I'm doin it rong.
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Ordinarily I use the DjView reader to convert DjVu files into PDFs and it works fine. However, I'm now dealing with some very large, high-resolution files without much luck: they will convert into PDFs, but when I try to open the PDFs I get the error message "insufficient data for an image".
From Googling around I found some online conversion programs. I get unexplained error messages with these programs. I suspect the problem is that the data for the DjVu images is in more than one file, so trying to convert just the individual file won't work. I have to pull all these files out of the compressed file in order to open the DjVu images in the DjView reader. Here's an example of what I mean.
Does this make sense to anyone else? I'm entirely self-taught in this kind of thing and it's entirely possible that I'm doin it rong.
Got an example you can link to?
Little quirks like this are what make DjVu wholly unsuited to be an archival format. I see that, while the software has been revised to fix bugs, the websites' comparison stats are roughly 15 years out of date.
posted by scruss at 4:26 AM on November 29, 2014 [1 favorite]
Little quirks like this are what make DjVu wholly unsuited to be an archival format. I see that, while the software has been revised to fix bugs, the websites' comparison stats are roughly 15 years out of date.
posted by scruss at 4:26 AM on November 29, 2014 [1 favorite]
Maybe convert the DjVu to images first.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:24 AM on November 29, 2014
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:24 AM on November 29, 2014
I would try to use DjVuLibre, as explained on StackOverflow.
posted by Sharcho at 6:21 PM on November 29, 2014
posted by Sharcho at 6:21 PM on November 29, 2014
Response by poster: Thanks for your suggestions, everyone. Here's the work-around I came up with and seems to be working so far:
Instead of converting to PDF with DjView, I go to Print and change the setting to grayscale rather than color. I have a PDF-creating program (PDF24) set as the default printer. Using PDF24 I save the file with "good" instead of "excellent" quality. This creates PDFs that are readable but of manageable size. Some of them are up to 16 MB, which still seems high for 4-6 pages documents, so I'll have to reduce the PDF size as well.
In all, a real pain in the neck. Have to agree with scruss: DjVu is pretty much the worst.
posted by orrnyereg at 10:10 PM on December 14, 2014
Instead of converting to PDF with DjView, I go to Print and change the setting to grayscale rather than color. I have a PDF-creating program (PDF24) set as the default printer. Using PDF24 I save the file with "good" instead of "excellent" quality. This creates PDFs that are readable but of manageable size. Some of them are up to 16 MB, which still seems high for 4-6 pages documents, so I'll have to reduce the PDF size as well.
In all, a real pain in the neck. Have to agree with scruss: DjVu is pretty much the worst.
posted by orrnyereg at 10:10 PM on December 14, 2014
One additional approach you might want to try is saving the DjVu file as a "Bundled DjVu Document" from the DjVu web plugin (right click, save as, Format: Bundled DjVu document) . You seem to have the component parts of a DjVu file bundle there. Then you should be able to convert it with your offline viewer.
There are better archival ways of doing this. If you print to PDF, you'll be mashing any watermark layer into the background, and making the document harder to read. Is there any particular reason to think that the source scans will disappear from the web?
posted by scruss at 4:47 PM on December 24, 2014
There are better archival ways of doing this. If you print to PDF, you'll be mashing any watermark layer into the background, and making the document harder to read. Is there any particular reason to think that the source scans will disappear from the web?
posted by scruss at 4:47 PM on December 24, 2014
This thread is closed to new comments.
Have you tried: http://www.zamzar.com/ ?
posted by yoyo_nyc at 10:59 PM on November 28, 2014