Book People Archive

Re: Browser-friendly text image compression

At 11:05 PM 8/29/01 +0700, Doug Cooper wrote:

  For some reason I'm having trouble
  tracking down a
  bi-level image compression format that:

    -- performs at Fax 4 or better,
    -- is either lossy _or_ non-lossy (but isn't jpeg).
    -- can be decompressed by typical browers.

  Anybody out there using JBIG or JBIG2, or a tiff/Fax4 
  decompression plug-in?


If you don't mind plug-ins, you might want to consider Xerox's Digipaper,
which is reportedly smaller by a factor of 2-10 than is TIFF Group 4 for
binary scanned images. See
<http://www.parc.xerox.com/asd/projects/digipaper/>

Another option would be DjVu, developed by AT&T and now being
distributed by Lizardtech
<http://www.lizardtech.com>

While their real strength is in color documents, they do make a bitonal
encoder. Compression seems to be much greater than with JPEG.
It has the advantage of being a commercial products with a growing user
base.

Peter Hirtle
phirtle1@[redacted]