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Comment by mnl | Hacker News Reader

I've been using it for years. For scanned materials it's simply better: files are smaller, rendering is snappy, and if you're into old books its background/foreground model really pays off.

Quite strange this scepticism here about good old djvu. Better fetch a book from the Internet Archive in both formats and check for yourselves why it's a thing.

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There's just no need for it.

50 years from now, you are not going to have any trouble finding a .PDF viewer, but DjVu is a different question entirely.

Your chances of things working would be much better with PDF as well given that the PDFA version is sometimes used.

Tell me how I can remove the background of a yellowed old book I have to read or print for my research side-project with a PDF file. I don't understand dismissive generalisations about a tool coming from people that don't use it. For the purpose it was designed for it does the job better than a format designed for an entirely different thing.

Frankly I don't expect having to read PDF files 50 years from now, but if I were thinking about preservation, the timeproof archiving medium still is acid-free paper –better yet, vellum– and probably India ink. As for the need of any technology, beyond stone tools and fire nobody really needs anything, it's just convenient.

Tell me how I can remove the background of a yellowed old book I have to read or print for my research side-project with a PDF file.

I think you may be confusing tools with file formats. There are any number of ways to do this with .PDFs, none of which I've personally had to explore.

Meanwhile, back on this planet...

I just can open this djvu file with a viewer and display foreground, done. I can focus on reading it, which is the whole point of me accessing this file. I don't have to process a bloated PDF version with any other tools you just don't even know, me neither.

Exactly, in this planet we still can read, for instance, books printed by Gutenberg, yet try to convert some Word files rotting in a low-density macintosh floppy from 25 years ago. Paper beats everything else because it's a passive medium that lasts centuries and comes with all the hardware you need. A computer file needs a whole ecosystem and being copied around often.

Will we even use files in 2068? I don't know. Maybe in 2047 PDFs will be out of mainstream support because 99% of customers will be using the next better format or workflow.

Exactly, in this planet we still can read, for instance, books printed by Gutenberg, yet try to convert some Word files rotting in a low-density macintosh floppy from 25 years ago.

Meanwhile, a .PDF from the same era would still be perfectly readable. There's a lesson there.

There was no way no create a pdf file with a Mac back in 1993. It didn't take off until Acrobat 3 a few years later, and then you couldn't make decent pdfs unless you bought Acrobat 4 and use Distiller. You'd typically share your doc (or whatever) files, and if you wanted portability you'd use PostScript. Which still is a better format if you have to make changes at the very last stage before printing.

Ordinary users just couldn't make pdfs without paying for additional publishing software until some ten years ago.

The lesson is that some formats become de facto standards, then people forget how that happened (and that it could happen again), and ignore better technical solutions for specific jobs.

> 50 years from now, you are not going to have any trouble finding a .PDF viewer

That is a very bold statement. 50 years is a long time even in human years. It's an eternity in technology years.

The .PDF format is already 25 years old. What do you expect to happen in another 50 to render it obsolete?

Specifically, what will kill off the .PDF format while leaving DjVu untouched?

Maybe:

- Moving to HTML and signed HTML file.

- JPEG > PDF on mobile so people send the first over the later.

Is there a standard for signing HTML files yet? I've not one where the signature and content could be in the same HTML file.

Nope, I am just thinking of using GPG to sign and/or protect the file content (like with any other file).

And the adoption of signed, presumably-uncompressed HTML files will leave DjVu in a dominant position because...?

It would just remove PDF from the dominant position. DjVu would still be mostly ignored by most.

Some people forget that 50 years ago punched cards was still the ubiquitous format and people were only just switching to magnetic tape.

Djvu certainly may fall out of use some day, but I think you are greatly underestimating how popular the format is if you really think think there won't be programs around to read it. It's not an obscure format, and there are widely used open source libraries to do so.

Every Linux distribution comes bundled with a DjVu viewer by default. I don't think it will be a problem.

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