There are a number of commercial DJVU reader apps for Mac and Windows, typically costing $20-$30 for a license, but there’s also an entirely functional open source program that might lack the elegance of a commercial app, but has the right price tag: free. Sure enough, double click and you just get a “don’t know how to open” error. On your Mac, the default app icon indicates that there’s already some trouble in MacOS land:Īny time there’s just a generic icon like this it means the operating system doesn’t have an app that can open it. I’ll be talking specifically about the MacOS platform herein, but it turns out that just about every solution I reference also works on a Windows PC so is platform agnostic. Let’s look at all three options… BEST DJVU READER APP FOR MAC OR WINDOWS In fact, there are three ways to work with a DJVU file: Install a reader app, use an online conversion program to make it a PDF, or download an app that can do that same conversion. Don’t worry, though, this is a solvable problem.

Then again, PDF was introduced in the late 1990s, so I suppose it had a bit of a head start. The problem is that DJVU files aren’t supported on most computing platforms, which is surprising since the format’s been around since about 2000. Big plus: The resultant files are astonishingly small! It’s optimized for scanned documents, so you often see it when a book, magazine article, or similar has been scanned.

The team at Bell Labs recognized this and created a different document format that alleviates a lot of these problems called DJVU (pronounce it like déjà vu). Why? Because it’s really designed for print documents, so images and other information tend to be a far higher resolution than needed for content you’re going to read on a screen. Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) file format seems to have taken over the world of digital documents, but while it’s pervasive, it also tends to produce really big files.

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