Plug-in to view high res DjVu images in your browser

If you’ve never heard of DjVu, it’s a unique way of viewing high resolution images in your browser whether for a magazine or high tech research purposes.

It allows the scanning, storing and exchanging of complex color documents such as magazine articles, maps, technical manuals and archived financial records. The plug in allows your browser to interpret the resolution of the images and display them correctly in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. Despite it’s power, it’s a very small plugin requiring only 900KB to download and can even be added to applications using ActiveX via VB, .NET and C++. As yet, the plugin is only available in a limited number of languages, mainly English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Italian, Polish and Chinese. The problem with this plugin is that you very rarely have to view DjVu images in you’re an average home user although I can see it would be useful for professionals, designers etc. The other thing is that, a bit like Adobe Reader, it has a tendency to hang when opening images or texts in DjVu format. There’s no telling sometimes whether it has crashed or is just slow in opening the file. It would have been more useful if they’d added a status bar when it’s opening files for this reason.

If you view DjVu files and images frequently, then this is an essential plug in although don’t expect it to reveal what it’s supposed to every time.

DjVu Image Viewer Plug-in is a supplement that is installed on your browser to display images that have been compressed with DjVu format.

Thanks to DjVu Image Viewer Plug-in developers of content for web pages can scan images at high resolution, books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, historical documents, etc. This plug in works with Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.