Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: > For Korean text, I have found that representation with "defective" > syllables was performing better through SCSU. I mean here decomposing > the TLV syllables of the NFC form into T and LV, and TL into T and L, > i.e. with partial decomposition. > ... > With this constraint, Korean is no more acting like Han, and the > precombined arrangements of LV syllables saves much on the SCSU > window; gains are also significant for for other binary compressors > like LZW on any UTF scheme, and even with Huffman or Arithmetic coding > of UTF-16*/UTF-32* schemes.
This seems reasonable, except that you have to transform the text from its original representation to this special, compression-friendly format. Data to be compressed will not come pre-packaged in this partially decomposed form, but will likely be either fully composed syllables or fully decomposed jamos. So you really have to perform two layers of transformation, one to prepare the data for compression and another to actually compress it, and of course you must do the same thing in reverse to decompress the data. This adds complexity, but is sometimes worth the effort. The Burrows-Wheeler block-sorting approach, for example, achieves very good results by adding a preprocessing step before "conventional" Huffman or arithmetic compression. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
