What is a djvu file and how do I open a djvu file?

DJVU, or déjà vu,, is a web-centric format and software platform for distributing documents and images. Djvu technology was originally developed at AT&T Labs between 1996-2001. It is a set of compression technologies, a file format, and a software platform for the delivery over the Web of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution images. DJVU content downloads, displays, and renders quickly, looks nicer on a screen, and consumes fewer resources than competing formats. The DjVu library is distributed as part of the open source package DjVuLibre which has become the reference implementation for files in the DjVu format. DjVuLibre continues to be maintained and updated by the original developers of DjVu since 2002.
The .djvu extension is a computer file format mostly designed to store scanned documents, specifically those containing a combination of text, line drawings, photographs, and indexed color images. DjVu uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, lossy compression, and arithmetic coding for bitonal (monochrome) images. This allows for high-quality, readable images to be kept in a minimum of space, so that they can be made available on the internet.
DjVu has been toted as an alternative to PDF, promising smaller files than PDF for most scanned documents. DjVu developers report that color magazine pages compress to 40–70 kB, black and white technical papers compress to 15–40 kB, and ancient manuscripts compress to around 100 kB; most usable JPEG images typically require 500 kB. Like PDF, DjVu can contain an OCR text layer, making it simple to perform copy and paste and text search operations. Free browser plug-ins and desktop viewers from a number of developers are available from the djvu.org site.

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