View .djvu files

Problem

You want to open .djvu files. Maybe you’d like to convert them in PDF format too.

“DjVu (pronounced like déjà vu) is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy compression for bitonal (monochrome) images. This allows for high-quality, readable images to be stored in a minimum of space, so that they can be made available on the web.” (source)

Solution

The default document viewer of Gnome (evince) can open these files, but it’s quite slow. There is a better program for this format called djview4.

sudo apt-get install djview4

This program can also export .djvu files in PDF format (however, it’ll take some while, the conversion is quite slow).

To open .djvu files with Midnight Commander, add these lines to ~/.mc/bindings:

regex/\.djvu$
   Open=djview4 %f &