🆕 blog! “Compressing Text into Images”
(This is, I think, a silly idea. But sometimes the silliest things lead to unexpected results.) The text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is about 146,000 characters long. Thanks to the English language, each character can be represented by a single byte. So a plain Unicode text file of the play is about 142KB. In […]
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#compression #ComputerScience #python
@Edent You could probably reduce it further by tokenising the 50 most common words down to greyscale values, maybe 45 or so as you'd then need *further* values as control codes to embed those tokenisations at the start of the image (or cheat, and do that out of band). I briefly made a start on trying that and then realised I have several more useful things to do today than implement a janky compression algorithm.
> So a plain Unicode text file of the play is about 142KB.
You could maybe get it under 100 KB by rewriting it in the Shavian alphabet.
