DjVu to PDF Converter
DjVu is a clever format for scanned books that almost no default reader opens. Converting a .djvu file to PDF puts the same pages into a format every phone, browser and printer already understands.
Convert to PDF
or drop DOC, DOCX, DOCM … files here ·
Max 95 MB per file· Up to 20 files· Deleted after 30 minutes
Files are processed on our servers and deleted after 30 minutes.
Convert the whole document or only some pages, slides or sheets.
Pages or slides to keep, e.g. 1-3, 5, 8-10. Numbers refer to the original document.
Source margins keep the document's own layout. Narrow is 12.7 mm, normal 25.4 mm, wide 50.8 mm left and right.
Excel, ODS and Numbers files: convert every sheet, or only the one that was open when the file was saved.
JPEG quality for photos inside the document. 90 looks identical to the source; lower it to make the PDF smaller.
Leave empty for no password. If set, the PDF asks for it before opening. Not available with PDF/A.
How to use this tool
- 1
Upload the .djvu or .djv file
Drop a scanned book, journal or manual onto the upload box. Files up to 95 MB each are accepted, and you can queue up to 20 volumes in one go.
- 2
Choose pages and image quality
All pages convert by default. To extract one chapter, open Advanced settings, set Pages to a range such as 45-80, and lower Image quality if the PDF must stay small.
- 3
Convert to PDF
Press Convert to PDF and download each book as its own PDF, or the ZIP when you converted a whole shelf.
Why DjVu files are hard to open, and why PDF fixes it
DjVu was developed at AT&T Labs in the late 1990s to put scanned books online when connections were slow. Its trick is separation: each page is split into a foreground mask of letters and lines, compressed with a bitonal codec called JB2, and a background of paper texture and illustrations, compressed with the IW44 wavelet codec at a much lower resolution. A 300 dpi scanned page shrinks to a fraction of what a JPEG of the same page would take.
That efficiency made DjVu the format of choice for digital libraries and shared e-book collections in the 2000s. The catch is support. No operating system includes a DjVu viewer, browsers dropped the old plug-ins long ago, and mainstream PDF software never added it.
PDF has the opposite profile: less efficient for scans, but readable everywhere.
How a DjVu page becomes a PDF page
Decode the layers
The text mask, the background and any color foreground of each DjVu page are decoded and recombined into one full page image.
Encode for PDF
The page image is compressed at the Image quality you set (80 on this page) and placed on a PDF page of the original dimensions.
Assemble the book
Pages are written in order, keeping only your range if you set one, into a single PDF per uploaded file.
DJVU
DjVu document
DjVu is a format for scanned documents developed at AT&T Labs and released in 1998. It separates each page into a sharp text layer and a smoothly compressed background, so scanned books can be much smaller than an equivalent image-based PDF. It supports an OCR text layer for searching. DjVu is popular in digital libraries and archives, but browsers, phones and most PDF readers need a plugin or separate viewer to open it.
- Compression
- Lossy or lossless
- Transparency
- No
- Animation
- No
- Introduced
- 1998 · AT&T Labs
Portable Document Format
PDF was created by Adobe in 1993 and became the open ISO 32000 standard in 2008. It fixes text, fonts, images and layout so a document looks the same on every screen and printer. PDFs can contain forms, signatures, links, attachments and searchable text, and the PDF/A variant is used for long-term archiving. The fixed layout makes PDFs hard to edit, and scanned PDFs contain only images unless OCR is applied. Every browser and operating system can open them.
- Compression
- –
- Transparency
- Yes
- Animation
- No
- Introduced
- 1993 · Adobe
Nearly every DjVu file is a scanned book or old manual that someone downloaded and now cannot open; PDF is the version that opens on a phone, a Kindle, a school laptop or a print shop counter without extra software.
Converting large DjVu books: limits and file size
- per DjVu file
- 95 MB
- files per batch
- 20
- until files are deleted
- 30 min
- accepted extensions
- .djvu .djv
A 400-page DjVu textbook is often only 5 to 15 MB, comfortably inside the upload limit. The PDF is where size grows: the same pages stored as ordinary compressed images can typically reach several times the original. Image quality 80 is preselected here as a balance between legible small print and a manageable file; drop to 60 for text-only books, or raise it to 90 for books with photographs and maps.
If the converted PDF is too big for an email or an upload form, split it by chapter with a page range, or pass it through Compress PDF afterwards. Both your upload and the PDF are deleted from our servers 30 minutes after conversion; how it works explains the process in more detail.
DjVu to PDF: common questions
Why can't my computer open a DjVu file?
Windows, macOS, iOS and Android ship without a DjVu reader, and neither Adobe Acrobat Reader nor Apple Preview supports the format. You need a separate viewer such as DjView, WinDjView or Sumatra PDF, or you convert the file once to PDF and stop worrying about it.
Why is the PDF larger than the original DjVu?
DjVu splits each page into a sharp black-and-white text layer and a blurry low-resolution background, then compresses each with a method built for it. A PDF built from those pages stores them more conventionally, so a typical result is a few times larger. Lower Image quality to 60–70 or run the result through Compress PDF if size matters.
Can I search or copy text in the converted PDF?
Only if text recognition was done on the scan at some point. Many DjVu books from digital libraries are image-only. If Find returns nothing in your PDF, run it through OCR PDF to add a selectable text layer.
Can I convert just a few chapters of a long DjVu book?
Yes. Set Pages to Page range and enter the page numbers as the DjVu viewer shows them, for example 1-12, 201-240. Only those pages end up in the PDF, which also keeps the file small enough to email.
Will the PDF open on a Kindle or e-reader?
Kindle apps, Kobo devices and most e-readers open PDF, while none of them read DjVu. Scanned pages do not reflow, so a 6 inch screen shows each page shrunk; choose a tablet or zoom in for small print.
Is DjVu still used by libraries?
Less than before. The Internet Archive stopped generating DjVu copies of its scans in 2016, and most newer scanning projects publish PDF directly. Older collections and Wikisource transcription projects still hold many DjVu files, which is why the format keeps turning up in downloads.
