Date   : Sun, 01 Jul 2001 01:13:47 +0200
From   : Isabel Cisternas & Robert Schmidt <rschmidt@...>
Subject: Re: Magazine test scans

Looks impressive to me, Mark!  

The danger with proprietary technology like this is of course the
possibility of its disappearance from the market.  If DjVu never takes
off, we're stuck with a plug-in that may not work in future browsers.

Points that weigh against this problem are
- the possibility to export to more standard formats (doesn't seem to be
available in the viewer?).  If a resulting PDF file will maintain the
same level of quality as well as whatever meta-information we decide to
add, the small size of DjVu files may be worth the risk for the time
being.
- the availability of an SDK (seems free, but I haven't downloaded it
yet, and I guess the meat will be hidden in compiled code) 

A bigger hurdle may be that the free DjVu-production program is limited
to 1-page documents.  OCR and keywords for searching are only available
commercially ($299).  Those of us wanting to take serious part in this
should probably shell out for the complete package - do you own this
yet, Mark?  But, hey, this is the same problem as with Acrobat.


Just my thoughts,

Robert