As you know, djvu format is an excellent and open format, but its fate is uncertain since it is overwhelmed by pdf, surely excellent, but closed and very difficult to manage. Even if a small part of djvu features are used by mediawiki, djvu in a necessary tool for wikisource work. Unluckily, there's no sufficient work about djvu, and I see that recently ABBYY discontinued the support of djvu format as output in its OCR engines. This is probably the cause of discontinuation of djvu files output bi Internet Archive. Is it possible to encourage MediaWiki to devoid sufficient energies to save djvu format to its fate? Alex brollo _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

I have heard about this issue many times, and it always seemed important, but also seems too hard to understand and act on. We could at least discuss possibilities online and at upcoming conferences. Could we distill these issues online on a wiki page somewhere? Or is it already done? (1) what are the significant differences between pdf and djvu (or some new version of djvu that we could imagine coming up with) (2) what partner organizations or developers would want to help or work on it? Is Internet Archive, for example, able and willing to work together on it, if we said specifically that this interests us? Can they help at least describe the difficulty of the things we’re taking about? Wikisource user group, some chapters perhaps. It is hard for a network of nonprofits to take the lead here, maybe, compared to a focused company . . . but maybe possible. On Apr 6, 2018, at 10:06 AM, Asaf Bartov <abartov(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Perhaps. But the case would need to be made (in more detail, and more compellingly) to the people who could decide that, and none of them are on this list. You'd probably have to convince managers of technical teams at WMF if there is to be a chance of prioritizing it. A. On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 1:33 AM Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

Peter Meyer, 06/04/2018 14:59: I agree this is important to outline. For instance, is there some Wikisource where PDF files are actively discouraged in favour of DjVu, and for what reasons? Which DjVu features we dream of using within 5 years, which PDF doesn't provide? Do we want a system where libraries can feed us with DjVu files, the proofread text gets ingested back to the DjVu file and libraries can reuse it? Do we want to use some of the low level features of the text layer to widely deploy some dark magic, such as the captcha-based proofreading we talked about many times or some other interaction between MediaWiki and the scans? What "market" is there for such features? DjVu became our favourite format back at the time when the upload size limit was around 10 MiB, if I remember correctly, and compression was the most important factor. I often find myself explaining why it's such a useful format, but in the end if someone asks me "so, is it fine to just upload a PDF at Wikisource?" I have a hard time giving an answer other than "sure, don't worry, it will be the same". Federico _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l