Removing characters for lossy text compression is only a silly idea if trying to solve a conventionally practical problem. Spoken and written languages have ro

Removing characters for lossy text compression is only a silly idea if trying to solve a conventionally practical problem. Spoken and written languages have roughly a 3x overhead for channel coding. You can get a message across while losing characters and even whole words. Does lossless compression to entropy of text really capture all of the data saving possible? What if you undid some of the channel coding by dropping sets of characters or words then compressing? We don't need to do it (bits are quite cheap), so we don't, but it is an interesting problem that helps think about other problems.