[pdftex] JBIG2 graphics and pdftex 1.40.0-beta

[Hartmut Henkel]

Hi,

fyi, there is a new pdftex-beta out, see:

http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-pdftex/2006-August/002305.html

What's interesting with this one is that it's the first pdftex-beta
containing support for native embedding of JBIG2 files. JBIG2 is a
rather new pixel graphics format for bitonal (black and white) images
like line and text scans, with a substantially better compression ratio
than other pixel image file formats. One JBIG2 file can contain several
image pages for even higher compression. PDF files with embedded JBIG2
graphics can be viewed at least by PDF viewers xpdf 3.01, Adobe Reader
6.0 upward, and by recent ghostscript versions.

Most importantly, at

http://www.imperialviolet.org/jbig2.html

you find the first and only open-source JBIG2 encoder (now version
0.23), written by Adam Langley. The encoder (binary "jbig2") does an
impressive job (just option -s is ok). Before this fine program was
available, one had to rely on expensive commercial encoders. Now you can
use pdftex e. g. for re-publishing of books with expired copyright as
compact PDF, by embedding page scans that were converted into JBIG2
format by jbig2. Hyperlinking can be done by adding of annotations...

Testing of the jbig2/pdftex-beta team welcome! Have fun!

Regards, Hartmut