Document Express with DjVu

DjVu Public Websites

What follows is a non-exhaustive list of public web sites using DjVu for publishing scanned books, catalogs, historical documents, research papers, manuals, etc. There are thousands of such sites: run a Google search for DjVu and see by yourself! We picked some of the ones we thought were most interesting or representative. We probably missed many though. If you have any suggestions, please send us email and we will be glad to add them to this list. These websites require the DjVu Plug-in.

DjVu Users

• Washington State Digital Archives
  Washington State Digital Archives uses Document Express with DjVu to make Washington state and county government public-access records and electronic documents easily available to anyone with access to a computer. The archive allow users to look up county birth, death and marriage records, military and immigration documents, and other historic records dating to the state's territorial period.
  
  
• The State of North Dakota
  The State of North Dakota uses DjVu extensively to make complex public documents easily viewed by the states citizens. Follow this link and view North Dakota State Governments House and Senate Bills and Resolutions.
  
  
• Century Dictionary
  At Century Dictionary, you will find more than 10,000 dictionary pages, totalling over 500,000 definitions, all in DjVu of course! This constitutes the largest freely available dictionary on the web. It is also an excellent demonstration of how large DjVu document collections can be easily and seamlessly searched over the web.
  
  
• The Cobb County Superior Court
  The Cobb County Superior Court in Georgia uses DjVu for real estate records, legal documents, and floor plans.
  
  
• Corporate Reports
  Corporate Reports, in the U.K., uses DjVu for scanned corporate reports, thereby keeping quality high and file size at a bare minimum. Try to do the same with PDF!
  
  
• Daeiei
  Daeiei, one of the largest department stores in Japan, publishes its brochures and catalogs on the web in DjVu. These brochures are rather large at over 6,000 x 4,000, but this is nothing that DjVu can't handle.
  
  
• DjVu Editions
  Interested in illustrated E-books of the World's Greatest Classics? Visit the DjVu Editions. One of our favorites is the 714 pages Illustrated Shakespeare, edited by G.C. Verplanck and published by Harper & Brothers, New York, in 1847.
  
  
• The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
  The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) publishes its ICAO Journal on line in DjVu format. For example, the January 2003 issue is available here.
  
  
• Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a public nonprofit organization that was founded to build an 'Internet library,' with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. DjVu is the format used by The Internet Archive to publish their large collection of scanned public domain and open source books, have a look at a nice color sample here. You can try yourself the different navigation experience that you will have using DjVu vs the PDF. Unless you have a lot of patience, do not attempt to download the 435MB TIFF file.
  
  
• Japan Center for Asian Historical Records
  The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, National Archive of Japan (English site available here) was founded in 1994 as the centerpiece of the "Plan for peace and friendship exchanges" and in commemoration of fifty years from the end of World War II. It opened in November 2001. Here is what they say about DjVu: "The Center can be considered a full-fledged digital archive of digitalized images of historical records and database of cataloged information accessible through the Internet. Image data becomes online information upon processing by the DjVu, the most advanced image compression technology developed for making large quantities of text contents accessible through the Internet." Browse the site and see for yourself!
  
  
• Komatsu Group
  Komatsu Group, a large global manufacturing conglomerate with 174 companies and $9B in annual sales is using DjVu to distribute its parts manuals to its large customer support network. This service is also being offered as an ASP (Customer Support System Network) to any other manufacturing company that wants to benefit from their DjVu based infrastructure. Click here for a sample of DjVu usage within the Komatsu group.
  
  
• Kubota
  Kubota is one of the world's largest manufacturer with sales over $6B in 2002. At Kobuta, DjVu is used internally as well as to publish and distribute catalogs and parts manuals, via the (CSS-Net service of Komatsu. Some samples are available here as PDF and DjVu. Guess which ones download faster?
  
  
• LG
  Electronic equipment manufacturer LG uses Document Express with DjVu to make user manuals for hundreds of products available quickly and easily online.
  
  
• Matsushita Denki
  Matsushita Denki, better known in the West for its Panasonic and National brands, uses DjVu throughout the organization for online catalogs. Sample catalogs are available at http://www.panasonic.biz (if you don't read Japanese, click here for a nice sample). Other examples can be found at http://www.mie.panasonic.co.jp or http://www.ezcc.ne.jp. The latter page is a nice example of DjVu embedded within an HTML page.
  
  
• Pennsylvania Department of Transportation
  The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation makes many travel and transportation maps easily accessible with DjVu.
  
  
• RealView
  RealView in Australia has developed a system that allows newspapers to put their contents online in a very cost performance way by converting those large and unfriendly pre-press ready PDFs into light and distributable DjVu files. Click here to see the Wentworth, their flagship customer and a beautiful example of DjVu usage.
  
  
• Samsung
  Did you like that cool mobile phone that Neo uses in The Matrix? Yes, it came courtesy of Samsung and you can now find any Samsung product manual on the web in DjVu form. Visit the Samsung support center at http://www.samsung.com, select a product, then click on the DjVu version of the manual (of course, you are welcome to select PDF if you have time on your hands, it will only take you several times longer to view or download).
  
  
• Teletrade
  Teletrade, an online auction site for certified coins, baseball cards and other sports memorabilia uses DjVu purely as an alternative to JPEG: pictures of the items being auctioned are provided in DjVu format, at a size 3 to 10 times smaller than a JPEG file of equivalent quality.
  
  
• Thielsen Architects
  Thielsen Architects is a vibrant design-oriented firm that is committed to creating distinctive built environments. A quote from their site: "To give you the most benefit from our web site, Thielsen Architects has encoded the drawing images with LizardTech's DjVu. This technology will allow you to view, zoom, and pan high resolution images that will download nearly as quickly as traditional low resolution static images." So click on their portfolio and enjoy those great designs in DjVu form.
  
  
• Travel Agencies
  Numerous Japanese travel agencies use DjVu to publish their catalogs. Here are pointers to a few of them:
  
  Nippon Airways (ANA) Tours.
  
  Nippon Travel Agency - Sample here.
  
  Travel.co.jp - Sample available here.
  
  
• University Libraries
  The open nature of the DjVu format together with its suitability for Web publication makes it the format of choice for many universities around the world, including:
  
  The Center for Electronic Text for the Humanities of Rutgers University uses DjVu as their main format for scanned documents on the Web. A sample from their "Spectator project" is available here.
  
  The University of Georgia library publishes books and periodicals in DjVu format. Yes, the image on the right that looks like a Jpeg is in fact an embedded DjVu file. Embedding was done using the 'static' option, which among others, disables the plug-in toolbar.
  
  University of New Mexico General Library. Sample available here.
  
  The Case Western Reserve University uses DjVu for its eDocs Digital Documents initiative. A sample was available here last time we checked.
  
  Sophia University Library.
  
  Ibaraki University Library. Click here for a sample.
  
  
• Wonders of World Engineering
  This website contains articles taken from a magazine called "Wonders Of World Engineering" published back in the 1930's. The articles range from describing how the Golden Gate Bridge was built to how ball bearings are made. The articles are scanned and presented in DjVu.