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NewspaperARCHIVE.com drops DjVu for
PDF
A report by PlanetDjVu, February 11,
2003 As
NewspaperARCHIVE.com exceeded 5 million newspaper pages last month, they
also replaced DjVu with PDF as the format in which full newspaper pages
are presented. The press
release for this change politely states: "Our old
browser plug-in, while quite powerful, did not work well for a small
portion of our clientele. Adobe is near universally used and accepted. It
just works." We suspect
that there is more at work here than just yielding to a small portion of
the clientele. NewspaperARCHIVE is competing with 4 or 5 other portal
sites to be the dominant search portal for newspapers, and was under
increasing criticism for being the only such portal NOT to be using the
PDF file format. NewspaperARCHIVE.com continued to use the DjVu format until the end
of last year, no doubt because of the performance benefits of the DjVu
format and the DjVu plugin. But they must have become increasingly
concerned, as we have been, about the viability of the DjVu web browser
plugin in the future. LizardTech could not even manage to keep the plugin
version numbers straight last year, and major elements of the plugin, like
the integrated ActiveX control, are not even documented. Users of the MAC
version of the DjVu plugin were reporting many problems last year, and MAC
users just might be the "small portion" of the clientele that were
referenced. By
requiring that subscribers install a current version of the Acrobat
Reader, NewspaperARCHIVE.com is able to deliver newspaper pages that use
the new JBIG2 compression method. This reduces the file size to a level
that competes well against the DjVu format, with its "JB2" compression
method (the same compression technology with a slightly different name).
We have presented a comparison of these compression methods in an earlier
news article, which you can view by clicking here. This
abandonment of DjVu is a setback for the public adoption of the DjVu
format, as thousands of NewspaperARCHIVE.com who previously would install
the DjVu plugin now will no longer do so. We wonder
if LizardTech, the owner of the DjVu file format, is concerned about this.
We doubt that they are even aware of it. The LizardTech website still
lists NewspaperARCHIVE.com as an example of a DjVu customer. Note:
the link is still listed as "Heritage Microfilm". The
DjVuZone.org website also still provides a link to "Heritage Microfilm",
but then it is obvious that the DjVuZone.org website has not been updated
since 2001, so we don't expect them to be updating links
now. NewspaperARCHIVE.com was by far the largest user of the DjVu file
format. There is no longer a website that can claim "millions of pages
served in DjVu". Too bad for the DjVu format, which needs any help it can
get these days, and not setbacks like this one. Reference Links: NewspaperARCHIVE.com News Release:
LizardTech DjVu Customers Page:
DjVuZone.org Link to
NewspaperARCHIVE.com
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