This is not terribly likely to happen unless we can provide useful
software support for it.

kontakt wrote:

We only want to store the files on commons. DjVu is just an alternative to PDF.

kontakt wrote:

How does Wikimedia provide software support for PDF files?

Hm, the question appears to be if "archive" files (as opposed to things that can
be shown "inline") are useful to Wikimedia. We already support several such
formats (PDF and several OpenOffice formats), so why not DjVu, if it is an open
and accepted format? I agreee that such files are not imediately useful to
Wikipedia, but they may be handy for Wikisource and Wikibooks (and, in
concequence, Commons).

kontakt wrote:

DjVu has several advantages to offer.

• it has a high compression ratio (very small files)
• it loads very fast (in contrast to PDF you can regard the first pages while

the others are loading)

• each page can be adressed individually
• the compression and encoding algorithms were published under the GNU licence

Therefore a pretty good number of research libraries are already offering DjVu
files. Some examples:

http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/eng/digibook.html (Jewish National and University
Library )
http://kpbc.umk.pl/dlibra (Kujawsko-Pomorska Digital Library)
http://www.numdam.org (Numérisation de documents anciens mathématiques)
http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks (Million Book Project)

It would be a great step towards a greater acceptance of Wiksource in the
academic world.

Can you provide some references for supporting software?
Being able to automatically generate thumbnail and medium-size
inline JPEGs from these would I suspect be very helpful.

kontakt wrote:

The Open Source DjVu library "DjVuLibre" is an implementation of DjVu, including
viewers, browser plugins, decoders, simple encoders, and utilities.

Among other things it includes a set of decoders to convert DjVu to other formats.

You can download it via
http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/

I just found an entry on the ImageMagick mailing list that does not sound so
good:
http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2003-April/008701.html.
Quote:

The open source DjVu is crippled by offering less efficient compression

algorithms.

You have to buy commercial product in order to use the really cool DjVu

compression

algorithms.

Maybe this has changed over the last three years?

klausgraf wrote:

I support Frank Schulenburg. Internet Archive is also using Djvu for the
thousands of books it is digitizing.

ezyang wrote:

Marking enhancement.

Support for uploading DjVu files with file type validation and
width/height detection added in r14994. Will enable shortly.

Thumbnailing support not yet present, but can be added later.

.djvu files may now be uploaded.

kontakt wrote:

GREAT! Thank you very much! Greetings, Frank