The Business Case for JBIG2 Primer

Return on Investment

The value proposition for JBIG2-PDF compression, optimization, and search has four main components:

    1.   Storage space savings. Compressing bitonal files can restore virtually 90% of your available storage capacity. Color files compress more than bitonal files, so color compression can restore over 98% of your company's existing storage space. Before spending needlessly on more storage space, you could batch compress all your PDFs. It is similarly advisable to convert TIFF and JPEG files to PDF and compress them at the same time. That way, all of your files will be viewable on demand, fully web-optimized and text-searchable. These compressed files will use dramatically less space and the files can always be restored to their native format if necessary.

    2.   Efficiently Web-host and email documents. Compression brings a cost savings inherent in using less bandwidth and eliminating overage charges. If you are transmitting files over the Internet or Intranet, you'll use 90%-98% less bandwidth by transmitting compressed PDF files. In addition, you will be able to email corporate files, monthly statements and newsletters without exceeding email attachment file size limitations.

    3.   Benefit from increased speed of transmission. Time is money for both the sender and receiver of an electronic transmission. JBIG2-compressed PDFs can deliver up to 10x faster transmission speeds than uncompressed PDFs. Consider these transmission time comparisons to upload over a 50 kb/sec connection:

Figure 1. Compressed PDFs transmit much faster than their Standard PDF counterparts.

PDFs, TIFFs and JPEGs can take a very long time to transmit and receive, even with a high-speed Internet connection. With compressed PDFs, a file that used to take 10 minutes to transmit would take 1 minute. That difference may be hard to measure in a direct dollar for dollar savings equation, but anyone who has ever waited 10 minutes to download a file knows the importance of speed.

    4.   Utilize OCR to retrieve files efficiently. Applying OCR to scanned documents makes them fully text-searchable and easy to retrieve. Many scanned corporate and litigation files would benefit from full text indexing and searchability. Most of these files are currently just field coded with a very limited field set in order to reduce costs. This limits the usefulness of captured documents since only these fields can be queried. By converting scanned documents from traditional formats such as TIFF to PDF, it becomes very easy to add a "hidden" OCR text layer and support full text search across the entire corporate database.