Interrupt19

Photo courtesy of DjVu.org

You may or may not have heard of the PDF alternative DjVu (pronounced Déjá Vu). Similar to Adobe’s PDF, DjVu was developed by ATT Research back in 1996. A free file format with no restrictions, DjVu was chosen for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project to convert paper books into eBooks. Its advantages include higher compression, font support is not required and is better for scanned images. It also includes provisions for OCR text recognition.

In case you do run across a djvu file (extension .djvu or .djv) in OS X, here’s what to do:

DjVuLibre
DjVuLibre is an open source application that will read DjVu files just like Acrobat reader (and Preview) will read PDF files. It is easy to use and set up. Once installed, double click on the .DjVu file and DjVuLibre will take care of the rest.

Download the Djvu reader DjVuLibre from Sourceforge.

LizardTech’s Safari PlugIn
LizardTech created a browser plugin for Safari. This plugin will read a DjVu file from a webpage directly in Safari without downloading the file.

Download the free plug-in from LizardTech here.

For more information:
DjVu.org