As a result, Web site content developers have been largely unable to leverage existing printed materials. DjVu allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web. Information that was previously trapped in hard copy form can now be made available to wide audience. Research institutions, libraries, and government agencies can give access to their archives.
Companies can distribute internal documents on their intranets.
DjVu is an open standard. DjVu typically achieves compression ratios about 5 to 10 times better than existing methods such as JPEG and GIF for color documents, and 3 to 8 times than TIFF for black and white documents. For color document images that contain both text and pictures, DjVu files are typically 5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG at similar quality. The DjVu plug-in is available for standard Web browsers on various platforms. The DjVu plug-in allows for easy panning and zooming of document images.