JRAPublish 1.5 Reviewed
 A review by Arnold Jagt, Freebooks.com, September 30, 2002
Sometimes a market for something is quite pregnant and ready to happen.
This usually only becomes obvious only after the fact as users take to the
new thing and make it a phenomenon.
Putting books on the web is one such thing waiting to happen. So far this
has been prohibited from occurring because of the thin pipes most people
have to the web. Unless something is as small in size as an HTML page it
will not flow through those thin pipes. If you have ever tried to read a
book online in image format you know how painfully slow it is. Whether in
TIFF Group4 format or in good old PDF, the size these formats generate are
about 5 to 10 times too large in black and white. Don't even think about
grayscale, much less color.
Then along came DjVu from AT&T Labs. Through the most advanced compression
technology on the planet, they made images of pages as small as the HTML
versions of the same pages! Even in color! Its almost unbelievable when you
first experience it.
As screen technology advances, as it surely will, seeing pages thus will
become the preferred method of viewing. Finally the proven technology of
publishing will be available in all its richness on the web.
To make all this happen you need a publishing tool to ready scans of paper
documents for publication. A tool that makes it fast, easy, and inexpensive
to produce clean, searchable, web-ready DjVu files on massive numbers of
scanned documents in automated batch mode - well that sounds like asking for
the moon. But its possible to ask that and get it with JRAPublish.
JRAPublish makes the job of preparing scanned documents for the web a
trivial task. Setup is simple and the learning curve short. All the hard
work is done by the software. Because it was made from the ground up to be
a batch processor, it is enterprise ready as few packages in its price range
are. I have had the software up and running for weeks at a time with no
interruption in service. It puts whatever CPU it is on to work like no
software I have ever seen. On a 800 MHz Pentium III I have been able to
process about 100 books per week. Wow.
JRAPublish uses the most advanced OCR software in the world. Forget the
consumer OCR packages. They don't hold a candle to the FineReader from
AABBY that JRAPublish uses. It handles all types of page formats even those
with color backgrounds and figures mixed in with the text thanks to DjVu's
amazing page segmentation technology.
To really appreciate JRAPublish you could first work with the PDF equivalent
JRAPublish wannabes. Error prone, slow, in need of continual manual
intervention and ultimately frustrating to your plans. Then try JRAPublish
and leave that frustration behind.
Arnold Jagt
September 30, 2002
Editors Note:
For details on the JRAPublish application, click here. JRAPublish is being upgraded to PDFPublish 2.0 now..
Please visit the PDFPublish product page at SearchPDF.com. We are providing the same advanced features for PDF file creation in PDFPublish that we implemented for the DjVu file format in the JRAPublish application.
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