0.00 GB / 1.00 GB monthly quota
0.00 GB / 1.00 GB additional quota
0 / 5 daily conversions
/month
Email with pasword reset link sent.
Enter your email address and we'll send you a link to reset your password.
DjVu came out of AT&T Labs in the mid-1990s, built for one job: making scanned pages small enough to read over a slow connection. It separates a scan into layers — the sharp black text as a bitonal mask, the background and photographs as lower-resolution images — and compresses each the way that suits it. A page that would run to a megabyte as a TIFF scan often lands near a tenth of that, with the lettering still crisp.
That focus is why it turns up in library and archive collections: digitised books, newspapers and manuscripts, frequently with an OCR text layer behind the image so the page can be searched. Outside those collections the format is uncommon, and most people meet a DjVu file only when they download one.
The .djv extension is the same format under a shorter name, left from systems that allowed three characters for it. Readers treat the two identically. Converting to PDF is the usual reason to be here: the page looks the same, and every device has something that opens it.
What to expect from the conversion: the scanned pages come across as pages, at the resolution they were stored. A DjVu built from a book scan is often smaller than the PDF made from it, because the layered compression it uses is more aggressive than anything PDF has, so the converted file can be noticeably larger while looking exactly the same.