On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 3:24 PM Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com wrote:
Nevertheless consider the file structure inside archive.org, who collects images into zip files and text into _djvu.xml files, so allowing to manage its brilliant viewer. Djvu format really can be used as a compact images+xml container, but it seems an obsolete file format, as recent discontinuation of output by archive.org suggests. Pdf is IMHO too complex and can't be considered an open format.
Let's look at one of the files I'm going to upload. https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v02n02_1923-09 was originally uploaded as a zip file of JPEG files. If I could upload it as that, or as the zip of JP2 files, I would. Right now, I'm going to convert them to DjVu and upload them, without any text information. However, there's a lot of cases where we just have PDF files, and I don't want to force some of our more technically unskilled users to have to figure out file conversion, especially where, in the case of PDF files, there's no point; Wikimedia can convert it loselessly to any number of pile of page image formats without much problem.
Pdf is IMHO too complex and can't be considered an open format.
It's got an ISO standard and royalty-free patent licensing. An open format doesn't have to be a simple or good one; it just has to have an agreed-upon standard without licensing problems.