Comment by kerkeslager
11 years ago
> 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 (safe for work)
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.
I haven't used it myself, but you might find http://projectnaptha.com/ interesting — it's in-browser OCR of text in images.
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.
It always worked pretty well for me. It just got annoying to have on all the time.