What is DocumentExpress with DjVu?
The best software solution for creating, manipulating, archiving and distributing colour scanned documents as DjVu file is a suite of applications for creating and manipulating highly compressed representations of scanned color documents. Typical compression ratios are between 300:1 and 1000:1, which brings new life and usefulness to color paper documents. Imagine this: a typical full-color, letter-size or A4-size DjVu file at 300 or 400 dots-per-inch takes a mere 50Kb, that is, the size of typical web page.

Capabilities:
DocumentExpress with DjVu not only allows you to create incredibly small DjVu files from any scanned document, you really bring paper documents back to life. Here are some of it's capabilies:

• Convert any electronic document (PDF, MS Word, Excel, HTML, etc.) to DjVu for archival, distribution, or collaboration.
• Effortlessly integrate scanned color or black and white documents into existing web sites.
  
• Instantly access scanned documents over any network and using any common platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun/Solaris and Unix).
  
• Use the built-in OCR engine to create DjVu documents that can searched, indexed, and integrated into large document repositories.

Summary of Features and Benefits of DjVu and Document Express:

• Amazingly small file size: DjVu document images are the smallest in the industry, up to 1,000 times smaller than TIFF files, and typically anywhere from 5 to 100 times smaller than JPEGs or PDFs.
  
• Breathtaking Image Quality: with DjVu, quality is never compromised: the same segmentation technology that is behind those exceptionally small file sizes also guarantees high image quality and text readability.
  
• Fast encoding: compressing a 300 or 400dpi letter-size color scan takes around 5 seconds on an average PC (2GHz P4)
  
• True Portability: Because DjVu is an image-only format, DjVu viewing is truly platform independent, without font issues ever getting in the way. Free viewers are available for all common platforms,
  
• Efficient Viewing: Quick zooming, panning, random page access and text search, on virtually any platform, over any network.
  
• Web integration: DjVu documents can be embedded in web pages as if they were JPEG images. CGi-like arguments can be used to precisely control the appearance of DjVu documents served (zoom level, presence of toolbar, thumbnails, etc.). Full hyperlink supports. Auto-install of plugin.
  
• Small plugin: DjVu viewing is available through free plugins that download and install quickly. The auto-installer for the Windows DjVu plugin is only at about 1MB in size.
  
• Parameter-free encoding: With DocumentExpress with DjVu, there is no need to specify endless compression options, the default settings are excellent in almost any situation. This results in substantial cost and time savings (no need for elaborate training to use the product, no rescanning needed, simplified scanning workflow)
  

Comparison with TIFF, JPEG, and PDF
In the following table, we assume that input documents are letter-size, 300dpi:
* Compression time for a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 PC with 512MB or RAM
** Compression ratios can vary significantly depending on compression options selected. For this study, we used DocumentExpress default compression options. The PDF 1.4 files were obtained using Acrobat 6.0 and the default compression settings for PDF 1.4 files. The PDF 1.5 files were created using the Adaptive Compression options of Acrobat 6.0.
*** DocumentExpress segmentation is consistently superior to the technology used in competing products and technologies. This is the primary reason why DjVu quality is more consistent -- and higher -- than what can be obtained with, e.g., Acrobat 6.0's adaptive compression
**** A thorough OCR quality test would require hundreds of documents and take weeks to conduct. For the purpose of this study, we are more interested in consistency and in a achieving a minimum OCR accuracy level. Whether actual OCR accuracy is 95% or 98% is usually not that important when text is mostly used for search and retrieval. What matters most is that the text be consistently extracted and OCR'ed from any input document. Here again, Document Express' superior segmentation technology enables it to reliably extract text across a wide variety of input documents, which in turn results in consistently high OCR rates.

Download DjVu Browser Plugin for free!
The DjVu Browser Plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator is the primary means of viewing DjVu documents. The plug-in enables users to view and navigate a DjVu document, and zoom and pan in real time. You can also search the text of a DjVu document if optical character recognition (OCR) was performed or if the document was converted from an electronic source.