Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 18:43, 21 October 2015

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In comparison with general-purpose compressors, it is not necessarily advantageous to use SCSU. Few applications need to compress so much Unicode text that it is worth using a special-purpose compression scheme which 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. One of several problems with SCSU is then that the savings of SCSU versus [[UTF-16]] or [[UTF-8]] drop after external compression,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://unicode.org/notes/tn14 |title=UTN #14: A survey of Unicode compression

|date=2004-01-30 |first=Doug |last=Ewell |accessdate=2008-06-13 |format=PDF }}</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 hundreds of bytes of data to break even against their own overhead. In [[Symbian OS]], SCSU is used even for Clipboard operations, e.g. Cut, Copy & Paste of small strings of text.