Many things

Antonio Carlini wrote: yes, it is information loss. scanning bilevel is a much worse information loss. scanning at 300 dpi, or 600 dpi, or 1000 dpi is information loss. viewing the document on a CRT is information loss. yes, you are right, *if*. And that is where you are wrong to assume it is likely to make a difference. Antonio -- yes, if you assume that the encoder is going to make gross errors, then it is a bad program and it shouldn't be used. but have you ever used it? it doesn't do anything of the sort. imagine a page with 2000 characters, all of one font and one point size, and that 150 of them are the letter "e". In a tiff image, there will be 150 copies of that e, all very slightly different. In the djvu version, the number of unique 'e's will depend on the scanned image, but it isn't going to replace them all with a single 'e' -- there might be 50 'e's instead of 150. Thank about that -- to the naked eye, all 150 look identical unless yo blow up the image with a magnifying tool. djvu is still being selective enough about what matches and what doesn't that it still has 50 copies of the 'e' after it has collapsed ones that are similar enough. It isn't very agressive at all about coalescing glyphs. As far as I know there is a bound on how small of a size it will try to group so that for really small point sizes, nothing bad happens at all. The differences it allows are truly inconsequential. It is like complaining that mp3 (or insert your favorite encoder here) sucks because in theory it can do a poor job of it. In fact, ones that do a poor job get left behind and the ones that do a good job get used.