|
DjVu Product Fall Roundup
A report by James Rile, PlanetDjVu, September 7,
2002 Summer has
ended now, and as we head into the Fall, we have decided to report on the
status of DjVu software applications and products that are commercially
available for your use in creating and using DjVu document
collections. Overview Unfortunately, it is not a very encouraging picture. DjVu
products that were previously available from LizardTech have disappeared,
to replaced last June by the announcement of new "Document Express" DjVu
products. The new Document Express products appear to be
unavailable. No prices, ordering instructions, detailed descriptions
or trial downloads are available at the LizardTech website or anywhere
else. JRA has
produced three new DjVu products, JRAPublish, JRAMetamaker and JRMD
Library, but these are not released yet because of licensing
complications. Bottom
Line - there are no DjVu encoding or editing products on the market today.
Not much of a "round-up", sorry to say! You can
still get an introduction to DjVu encoding, as we wait for DjVu products
to again become available, by making DjVu files on the Any2DjVu conversion
server hosted by the original DjVu format authors, and then viewing these
with the DjVu Web Brower Plugin. DjVu
Products from LIZARDTECH: Document Express Workgroup or Professional Edition / DjVu Solo
3.1 / DjVu Shop 2.0 This is
the Windows desktop application for creating and editing DjVu files.
It is not currently available, but it may become available again in
the fall from LizardTech, and it may become available directly from
PlanetDjVu. A little
history is in order. This product was released as "DjVu Shop", prior
to the sale of DjVu technology by AT&T to LizardTech. In
September, 2000, it was upgraded and renamed by LizardTech as "DjVu Solo
3.1". It was offered as a free download without OCR for
non-commercial use, and was sold by LizardTech with OCR for commercial
use, for $299. In June
2002, DjVu Solo 3.1 was pulled from the market, and the free
non-commercial download was removed from the LizardTech website, with no
explanation given. It appears that there will no longer be a free
non-commercial product download, but we were unable to verify this with
LizardTech. We
understand that the DjVu Solo 3.1 application is forming the basis for the
Document Express Desktop Edition and Document Express Professional Edition
products from LizardTech. We have listed what we know about these
upgraded and renamed applications in the Products section of
PlanetDjVu. Document
Express Desktop edition will add the Virtual Print Driver to the product,
which will enable you to "print to DjVu" from any desktop application.
We had hoped to prepare a review of this application at PlanetDjVu,
but have been unable to obtain an evaluation copy for this
purpose. This
product has always had the potential to be the kind of low-cost,
mass-market application that Acrobat is for PDF, but this never happened.
Now it is apparently off the market altogether. If you are
looking for an introduction to DjVu encoding, we suggest that you try the
"Any2DjVu" online conversion server (link to it from the home page of
PlanetDjVu). If you will search for "DjVu Solo 3.1" in Google, you
also might find a couple of websites still innocently offering a download
of this non-commercial product. Document Express Workgroup Edition / DjVu Workgroup
3.0 This is a
Windows GUI application for DjVu encoding. It permits up to 9
watched folders to be defined for drag-n-drop encoding. DjVu
Workgroup 3.0 was first released by LizardTech in March, 2001, then
recalled and re-released in July, 2001. In June,
2002, DjVu Workgroup 3.0 was pulled from the market without explanation.
In September, Document Express Workgroup Edition is still not listed
as a product on the LizazrdTech website, but we are informed that it will
be listed. Document Express Enterprise Edition / Document Express Service
Bureau Edition / DjVu Enterprise / DjVu Bitonal Enterprise / DjVu Command
Line Encoder / DjVu Bitonal Command Line Encoder This is
the multi-OS command-line encoding tool that was first introduced by
AT&T Labs as "DjVu Command Line Encoder" and "DjVu Bitonal Command
Line Encoder". LizardTech later renamed these applications to "DjVu
Enterprise" and "DjVu Bitonal Enterprise". In June,
2002, these products were pulled from the market without explanation. We
understand that the replacements are now called "Document Express
Enterprise Edition" and "Document Express Service Bureau Edition".
The "bitonal-only" product has been dropped. This is a
command-line application, meaning that it has no GUI interface. This
is great if you are building a shell script for batch execution, but is
not suitable if you need an "out-of-box" solution. Virtual
Print Driver The
Virtual Print Driver is a Windows print driver with which you can print
any digital file to DjVu. It is announced that this will be part of the
Document Express Desktop Edition. This sounds like a great way to
turn graphically-rich files like Quark or Pagemaker files to DjVu.
Although the techonology was developed by AT&T Labs over two
years ago, it has not yet been introduced. Also, we at JRAPublish
have repeatedly requested an evaluation copy, most recently for this
article, and have been turned down each time by LizardTech. We have
never even seen an example output file! So this technology remains a
"virtual" mystery to us. PDF-to-DjVu Module This is an
application for converting digital PDF files to DjVu files. It is
tightly coupled with Ghostscript. We had the opportunity to test a
prototype of this application a year ago, and it looked very promising.
Today, it is announced by LizardTech as an add-on module for
Document Express Enterprise Edition. It is
unclear how it integrates with Enterprise Edition as a "module", since
Enterprise Edition has a command-line interface and PDF-to-DjVu ha (had) a
GUI interface. It is unclear why you must first purchase Enterprise
Edition before purchasing the PDF-to-DjVu module. It is unclear
whether you will have to pay "by the page" using the Express Cartridge
Manager. We were unable to get answers to these questions from
LizardTech. DjVu
Editor This is an
application for editing individual DjVu files. The DjVu Editor 3.0
was bundled in the past with the DjVu Workgroup and DjVu Enterprise
products from LizardTech. Today, this product is no longer available
and LizardTech declines to comment on what happened to
it. DjVu
Products from JRA: JRAPublish - for DjVu This is a
Windows GUI application for DjVu encoding, DjVu metadata creation and dual
PDF creation. Details and the full Help File are available for
review in the Products section of this website. This application
uses the ABBYY Finereader OCR engine, which supports 176 languages.
It supports DjVu embedded metadata creation for JRASearch. The
status of this application is "finished". It is not released for
Djvu because of licensing complications with LizardTech. It IS
available now for searchable-image PDF file creation. JRASearch - for DjVu This is a
Windows Web-Server application for the hosting of DjVu document
collections with Search Term Highlighting and Hit Page Downloading.
See the numerous live demonstrations from the JRASearch Demonstration Page. This
application is available now for DjVu, PDF, HTML, and XML
formats. JRAMetamaker - for DjVu This is a
Windows Web-Server application for adding embedded metadata (index fields)
to DjVu files. See the live
demonstation. Embedded metadata is stored in the JRMD text
chunk of DjVu files, following the standards defined by JRA, supported by
JRASearch and published here. This application uses the JRMD Library, which is a COM component used for
updating DjVu files on the web-server. Unfortunately, JRMD Library
is not available due to licensing complications with LizardTech concerning
the use of the DjVu Reference Library, so it is available today only for
the PDF file format. JRMD
Library This is a
COM component for Windows web-servers that can read and write the
following in DjVu files: Metadata (index fields), Annotations
(comments), Bookmark structures. It is compiled with elements of the
DjVu Reference Library, which are not yet licensed from LizardTech, so
this product is not commercially available yet. Conclusions We will
update this "fall roundup" as soon as there are some DjVu products to
"round up"! Hopefully this is soon. We are waiting for our new
reseller agreement, and further information and announcements about the
Document Express product
line. |
