Subject: Possible reduction of bandwidth for HXWZ

From: "(Dave Cottingham)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 11:05:41 -0400

Perhaps this has been noted before, but I have noticed that the way
HXWZ encodes Chinese for mailing (uuencoded GB) is not the most byte
efficient way possible.  For example, the latest issue, cm9210c, has
about 47.5 Kbytes.  If you translate the GB into HZ (which is ASCII
and therefore mailable), the length is 38.6 Kbytes.  And if you
compress the GB file (using Unix compress) and run it through btoa (a
binary to ascii translator like uuencode, but more efficient) the
resulting file is 32.4 Kbytes.  These lengths include the table of
contents and instructions that are usually prepended to issues of
HXWZ, but do not include the mail headers.  So normalizing the file
sizes to the last method, we have

Method			Relative size
------			-------------
GB + uuencode		1.5
HZ			1.2
GB + compress + btoa	1.0

Of course, ease of use is more important than a reduction in mail
message size, but neither of these alternatives is impossible
(implausible maybe, but not completely impossible).  HZ is pretty
widely understood by printing and viewing programs now, and btoa and a
Unix compatible compress are available for a fair range of computers
and systems.

 - Dave Cottingham
   [email-masked]

---

From: Huijie <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 11:55:23 EST

Hi, Shangjie,

]> Method			Relative size
]> ------			-------------
]> GB + uuencode		1.5
]> HZ			1.2
]> GB + compress + btoa	1.0
]>
]>  - Dave Cottingham
]>    [email-masked]
]
]You may miss one point. How about "GB + compress + uuencode"?
]Its size should be same as 1.0 or so.
]Anyway, this will ask HXWZ readers to set up the compress utility.
]
]Shangjie Jin

Good point, Shangjie.

I took cm9210c.gb for testing, and the relative sizes are,

Method			Relative Size
-----------		--------------------
GB+zip+uuencode		0.932
GB+lha+uuencode		0.862

Yes, it saves bandwidth.  But it requires readers to own and operate a
compressor every time.

Here could be the another way to solve the previous problem, by converting
the compressed files into self-extract format before uuencode.

Method			Relative Size
-----------		--------------------
GB+zip+exe+uuencode	1.485
GB+lha+exe+uuencode	0.937

You can see that using lha is still a big save.  However, this also limits
users to a specific machine, for instance, MS DOS or Unix.

Then, to save the bandwidth, HXWZ editors need to distribute more than one
version of package.  And users need to pick one that fit its plateform.  I
think it is a pain. :-)!

Oops, nothing is perfect.

Huijie
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