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> Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compres

> Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: <Twitter Logo Here>. My reaction when reading this was, "Yeah, but that's because you encoded it in PNG. That's a 'good-enough' encoding, but you can definitely make it more efficient by making it an SVG, since that image is of the kind that's ideal for vector graphics." And then I remembered SVG is a text-based image format. Touché, frog hop. Touché. Adding to the point: karma system on sites such as Reddit has incentivized converting text into images, because text posts don't get karma. For example, r/quotesporn[1] (safe for work) has many more users and quotes than r/quotes[2] which allows only text. As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because I can't copy/paste the quotes into my personal quotes collection. [1] http://reddit.com/r/quotesporn http://reddit.com/r/quotesporn (safe for work) [2] http://reddit.com/r/quotes http://reddit.com/r/quotes

kps 12y ago
> As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because > I can't copy/paste the quotes into my personal quotes collection. I haven't used it myself, but you might find http://projectnaptha.com/ http://projectnaptha.com/ interesting — it's in-browser OCR of text in images.
- undergroundhero 12y ago
  I used the Chrome extension for a few months and the OCR was never very accurate. Even giant, clear block letters were often not recognized.
  - TylerJay 12y ago
    It always worked pretty well for me. It just got annoying to have on all the time.
gjm11 12y ago
My reaction was: "20x20 pixels = 400 pixels so he's taking 10 bits for each pixel; no way should that be happening". So I copied the image into paint.net (I happen to be on a Windows box here) and told it to save it as a PNG. 998 bytes. (I think it takes up 4k on my HD, but that's because of filesystem inefficiency; it would take up 4k if it were a text file just saying "tweet", too.) I do agree with the general point, though: for most purposes 998 bytes of text (more if compressed) will tell you more than that little tweeting-bird image.

kps 12y ago

> As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because > I can't copy/paste the quotes into my personal quotes collection. I haven't used it myself, but you might find http://projectnaptha.com/ http://projectnaptha.com/ interesting — it's in-browser OCR of text in images.

undergroundhero 12y ago
I used the Chrome extension for a few months and the OCR was never very accurate. Even giant, clear block letters were often not recognized.
- TylerJay 12y ago
  It always worked pretty well for me. It just got annoying to have on all the time.

gjm11 12y ago

My reaction was: "20x20 pixels = 400 pixels so he's taking 10 bits for each pixel; no way should that be happening". So I copied the image into paint.net (I happen to be on a Windows box here) and told it to save it as a PNG. 998 bytes. (I think it takes up 4k on my HD, but that's because of filesystem inefficiency; it would take up 4k if it were a text file just saying "tweet", too.) I do agree with the general point, though: for most purposes 998 bytes of text (more if compressed) will tell you more than that little tweeting-bird image.