Ryan Dabler wrote:
I realize it's a lossy compression,
Just some basics here: When you digitize old books, the greatest
loss is in the paper being torn, yellow of age, stained by coffee,
and ink having faded. Next step, the scanning or photography
always loses part of what the printed page contains. After this,
it doesn't matter quite so much if the compression of the computer
file is "lossy" or not. Don't get religious about "lossless"
compression. A good result can still be achieved by paying
adequate attention to every step of the process. But
perfectionism just doesn't pay. If you get unreadable results,
you need to go back and redo the steps that failed.
Formats like GIF, JPEG and TIFF existed in 1990. DjVu and JBIG2
are more advanced formats that have appeared later than that and
are still not very common in free software applications.
If you failed in using DjVu, it's not the format's fault.
(like TIFF, although that might produce MASSIVE file
sizes if we
link 600 pages together into one file).
TIFF is a container format that can hold images in a variety of
compressions and formats. Perhaps you are referring to raw tiff.
Anyway, what's considered huge changes with time. When people
download government reports in PDF today, they download an entire
book (500 pages) instead of individual chapters (25 pages).
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se