Last modified: 2006-06-24 08:12:58 UTC
For the usage on de:Wikisource we would like to upload DjVu-Files (for our scanned images, e.g. all scans of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rechenbuch_des_Andreas_Reinhard) on Commons. Today DjVu does not belong to the accepted file types on Commons. Nevertheless it is a popular file type in the academic world, especially for compressed scans of historical books in digital libraries. DjVu is an Open File Format. The file format specification is published as well as source code for the reference library. In 2002 the DjVu file format was chosen by the Internet archive as the format in which its Million Book Project provides scanned public domain books online. We propose to add DjVu (.djvu) to the list of accepted file formats for all mediawiki projects.
This is not terribly likely to happen unless we can provide useful software support for it.
We only want to store the files on commons. DjVu is just an alternative to PDF.
How does Wikimedia provide software support for PDF files?
Hm, the question appears to be if "archive" files (as opposed to things that can be shown "inline") are useful to Wikimedia. We already support several such formats (PDF and several OpenOffice formats), so why not DjVu, if it is an open and accepted format? I agreee that such files are not imediately useful to Wikipedia, but they may be handy for Wikisource and Wikibooks (and, in concequence, Commons).
DjVu has several advantages to offer. * it has a high compression ratio (very small files) * it loads very fast (in contrast to PDF you can regard the first pages while the others are loading) * each page can be adressed individually * the compression and encoding algorithms were published under the GNU licence Therefore a pretty good number of research libraries are already offering DjVu files. Some examples: http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/eng/digibook.html (Jewish National and University Library ) http://kpbc.umk.pl/dlibra (Kujawsko-Pomorska Digital Library) http://www.numdam.org (Numérisation de documents anciens mathématiques) http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks (Million Book Project) It would be a great step towards a greater acceptance of Wiksource in the academic world.
Can you provide some references for supporting software? Being able to automatically generate thumbnail and medium-size inline JPEGs from these would I suspect be very helpful.
The Open Source DjVu library "DjVuLibre" is an implementation of DjVu, including viewers, browser plugins, decoders, simple encoders, and utilities. Among other things it includes a set of decoders to convert DjVu to other formats. You can download it via http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/
I just found an entry on the ImageMagick mailing list that does not sound so good: <http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2003-April/008701.html>. Quote: The open source DjVu is crippled by offering less efficient compression algorithms. You have to buy commercial product in order to use the really cool DjVu compression algorithms. Maybe this has changed over the last three years?
I support Frank Schulenburg. Internet Archive is also using Djvu for the thousands of books it is digitizing.
Marking enhancement.
Support for uploading DjVu files with file type validation and width/height detection added in r14994. Will enable shortly. Thumbnailing support not yet present, but can be added later.
.djvu files may now be uploaded.
GREAT! Thank you very much! Greetings, Frank
