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DjVu was designed for one thing: making scanned documents small. A 300 DPI scanned page that would be 500 KB as a PDF compresses to 50-80 KB in DjVu. The format achieves this by separating text from background — it encodes the text layer at high resolution with aggressive compression and the background image at lower resolution. For scanned books, journals, and historical documents, the savings are dramatic.
The format found its niche in digital libraries, academic archives, and document scanning workflows. The Internet Archive uses DjVu for millions of scanned books. Russian-language digital libraries adopted it extensively. For pure text PDFs (not scans), the advantage disappears — DjVu's trick only works when there's a visual background to separate.
DjView and WinDjView are the standard viewers (both free). Browser plugins existed but died with the plugin architecture. For maximum compatibility, convert to PDF — the files will be larger, but everyone can open them. Most DjVu viewers include a PDF export function.