Lossy compression vs. archiving and OCR (was Re: Many things)

But that's what you yourself said that the DjVu software does. It replaces glyphs with other glyphs that it thinks are similar. No matter how good a job it thinks it can do of that, I DO NOT WANT IT FOR ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTS. I normally scan at 300 or 400 DPI; when there is very tiny text I sometimes use 600 DPI. Even at those resolutions, it can be difficult to tell some characters apart, expecially from poor quality originals. But usually I can do it if I study the scanned page very closely. No, OCR today cannot do as good a job at that as I can. Someday OCR may be better. But arbitrarily replacing the glyphs with other ones the software considers "good enough" is going to f*&# up any possibility of doing this by either a human OR OCR. And all to make the file a little smaller. DVD-R costs about $0.25 to store 4.7GB of data, so I just can't get excited about using lossy encoding for text and line art pages that usually don't encode with lossless G4 to more than 50K bytes per page. Eric