Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:53, 2 June 2008

Revision as of 06:57, 2 June 2008

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== Comparison with external compression schemes ==

SCSU has not been a resounding success. Few applications need to compress so much Unicode text that it's worth using a special-purpose compression scheme which (so far) does not have widespread support. Also, while it can be used as a text encoding, it can be difficult to handle internally.

Treated purely as a compression algorithm, SCSU is inferior to most commonly-used general-purpose algorithms for texts of over a few kilobytes. TheOne realof problemseveral problems with SCSU is then that the savings of SCSU versus [[UTF-16]] or [[UTF-8]] drop after external compression<ref>[http://unicode.org/notes/tn14 UTN #14: A survey of Unicode compression]</ref>, often dramatically so.

SCSU does have the advantage that it can usefully compress texts that are only a few characters long, whereas most full-scale compressors need a few kilobytes of data to break even against their own overhead.