Seattle Weekly is now posting an electronic version of the print edition at print.seattleweekly.com, where it can be viewed with a regular Web browser, thanks to technology developed by Seattle-based LizardTech. With LizardTech’s DjVu imaging software, our entire publication can be viewed as it was printed, complete with advertisements. Each week’s edition should be available for viewing about 8 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesdays, which is about the time our 109,000 papers are on the streets in metropolitan Seattle.
Every page of the print edition can be browsed and searched. Ads and articles contain relevant links to other sites on the Web. In addition to this week’s edition, we have posted the Aug. 3 Best of Seattle issue.
To view Seattle Weekly‘s print edition on the Web, you will need to download a LizardTech browser plug-in called DjVu, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. (There’s also a link at print.seattleweekly.com.)
DjVu is similar in capability to the ubiquitous portable document format (PDF), but DjVu file sizes are a fraction of the size of PDFs. LizardTech recently put 80 years’ worth of The New Yorker magazine—4,000 issues—on just eight DVDs. Seattle Weekly is the first U.S. newspaper to use the technology.
For the geeks among you, the core technology underlying DjVu was developed by AT&T Research Labs and is now open-source. LizardTech’s Document Express Software Development Kit (SDK) enables developers to integrate DjVu encoding and decoding into applications. The company is involved in all forms of digital content, including aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and color scanned documents. The Washington Secretary of State’s digital archives site (www.digitalarchives.wa.gov) uses DjVu technology.
If you have questions or feedback about Seattle Weekly‘s print edition online, please contact our new media development director, Gary Love.
