CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • February 23, 2018 at 3:12 am #101936
    Ann Farr

    Member

    Hi, so the book publisher I work for sent me 402 DjVu files which he wants PDFed and in a book. After a morning trying out half a dozen so-called DjVu to PDF apps (which did nothing) I found DjVu Libre and 402 times converted one DjVu file to .ps which I then distilled (Acrobat Distiller). This all eventually took nearly two days. The DjVu files are separate pages of some ancient book in German script — just images, no fonts or photos or anything other than scanned pages.

    Better point out that I’m on Mac OSX Mavericks (10.9) and using CS6. So yesterday I put all 402 into an InDesign document (402 facing pages of a decent size to hold the PDFs) and, with relief, exported it to a medium resolution PDF. After waiting an hour and a half (despite the little bar in InD’s menu showing it was working away) I looked at Force Quit and found InD wasn’t responding. Repaired Disk Permissions, deleted InD prefs, restarted, repeated all that. Same result. Gave up and had dinner!

    So this morning I thought I’d try exporting the first 20 pages which took ages but worked: well, the PDFs of the above German book look like dirty pages – no words, just mess. I’m on the verge of giving up. I can open each page in Acrobat and it’s fine. I’ve even tried inserting pages and that works but only one at a time. I can’t find anything to do with DjVu files on the forums here and wondered if anyone has any ideas.

    Thanks for your time.

  • February 23, 2018 at 9:31 am #101941
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Try waiting a bit (a lot) longer?
    I’ve had InDesign throw up a “not responding” in OS X’s Force Quit dialog, but in fact it was just working “hard but slow”. If I left it, it eventually finished.
    Can’t remember what task, but it might have been connected with a table that stretched over 100s of pages. I know I went and had dinner while it finished.

    Chris.

  • February 23, 2018 at 6:49 pm #101947
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I’ve actually never heard of DjVu files… Interesting!
    Chris: If 20 pages don’t look right, then I don’t think waiting is going to work… I mean, it might finish, but I would assume the results would be just as bad.
    Ann, my guess is that you’ll need to distill it to something else… some other PDF preset perhaps… and then get at least 1 page to work. Then try more.

  • February 24, 2018 at 1:58 am #101949
    Ann Farr

    Member

    Thank you both so much for reading my plight! In the end, I opened one PDF in Acrobat and inserted pages 10 at a time. Disaster!! the pages were inserted numbered back to front! Gah!! And each page had a consecutive numbered filename. Really?!

    So I binned that one and eventually found Combine Files which not only got them all (401 pages) into the dialogue box at once but actually in the right order. I then saved the PDF and, with a huge sigh of relief, sent it to the publisher who has, he says, been trying to read these pages for a year!! Brownie point for me then! Now I wonder if I should charge him for two days … probably not I suppose.

    Anyway, it’s so great to have InDesignSecrets here. Thank you very much. At least this might provide an answer I suppose for anyone else in the same boat.

  • March 3, 2018 at 1:22 pm #102107
    Lindsey Martin

    Member

    Above you wrote that you tried a number of conversion apps that failed. Did you try to convert from DjVu to PDF using the app from Enolsoft?

  • March 4, 2018 at 4:17 am #102111
    Ann Farr

    Member

    No, what a shame, the search engines didn’t find that one and it looks as if it would have done everything I needed.

    I tried something that was supposed to work online — but didn’t. Then I bought DjVu to PDF Converter (Nikita Zubkov) from the App store — which did nothing at all, absolutely nothing although I could see (in Preview) the files. And the DjVu2PDF which was the same. And then I got the free DjView.app from DjVu Libre which provided the complicated and long-winded method I described at the beginning. I’m not very patient and after DjVu Libre I gave up looking.

• Author
  Posts