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The '''Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode''' (SCSU) is a [[Unicode]] Technical Standard to reduce the number of [[byte]]s needed to represent text, especially if that text uses mostly characters from a small number of Unicode blocks. It does so by dynamically mapping the values in the range 128-255 to blocks of 128 characters. Since most alphabets are in 128 contiguous Unicode codepoints, this allows for 1 byte per character (plus overhead) encoding for many text files. SCSU will also switch to UTF-16 internally to handle non-alphabetic languages.
SCSU is not a resounding success. Few places need to compress enough Unicode text to make it worth using a poorly supported compression scheme. Treated purely as a compression format, it's inferior to most commonly used compression programs for texts over a few kilobytes. It can be used as a text encoding, but it's very hard to handle internally, and the percentage savings between SCSU and [[UTF-16]] or [[UTF-8]] drops after external compression, dramatically in the case of [[bzip2]] and other modern compression schemes. It does have the advantage that SCSU can compress texts that are only a few characters long, whereas most full-scale compressors
[[Reuters]], the organization that floated the first draft of SCSU, is believed to use SCSU internally.
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