Comparison of DjVu SDK with Acrobat SDK
A comparison by James Rile, PlanetDjVu, June 2, 2002

Update on 6-21-2002: The DjVu Encode SDK 3.5 is no longer listed as a product on the LizardTech website. -ed.

Looking to develop custom solutions using DjVu?

LizardTech offers the DjVu Encode SDK 3.5.  The on-line documentation is available at this address: http://www.lizardtech.com/products/index.php?x=2&p=12&o=1&v=b

It consists entirely of the following text:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) API-new!-
Several functions for handling XML files that contain information about DjVu files.
Internationalized core (UTF-8 compliance/support for any character set)-new!-
Localized versions available in English, Japanese, German and French-new!-
Encoding or decoding of single and multiple pages with one function call
Support for bitonal and color documents
Thread safety
Shared shape dictionaries for reducing file sizes
Support for input file formats BMP, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PBM, PNM
Support for pseudo-DjVu files (wraps JPEG or TIFF G4 files into DjVu format without changing data)
Ability to combine any number of existing DjVu documents into a single file
Ability to extract any page from a single file into a separate file
Index for navigating separate files together
Direct output to single-page JPEG, TIFF, PS, PNM, PBM, BMP and PICT files

While this SDK will allow you to perform custom DjVu encoding, it will not allow you to perform any other non-encoding operations.  For this you would need the DjVu Reference Library, but it is not available for commercial licensing.  You also cannot customize DjVu viewing, since the DjVu Viewer plugin has no SDK or viewer plugin architecture.


Looking to develop custom solutions for Acrobat PDF?

Adobe has just updated the documentation for the Acrobt 5.0 SDK, which you review at: http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1557, or directly from Adobe at: http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/acrobat.html

This online documentation totals over 1,000 pages  With the SDK you can customize just about anything imaginable!

Some of the things you can do with the SDK are:

Write plug-ins that extend the functionality of the Acrobat viewers. To do this, you use the Acrobat Core API . You may also use the functionality of other Acrobat plug-ins

Write external applications that communicate with and control Acrobat. To do this, you use the interapplication communication (IAC) APIs

In addition to the Acrobat viewers, you can control applications such as Distiller and PDFWriter through IAC and other mechanisms.

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