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Participant
March 8, 2020
Question

Compression of PDF - e.g. Bible shorter than .txt

  • March 8, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 866 views

Dear Community

I found the (german) Bible under https://info2.sermon-online.com/german/MartinLuther-1912/ 

In this the PDF-version (3'736 KB) is much shorter than the TXT-version (4'368 KB) :

 Martin_Luther_Uebersetzung_1912.pdf2016-03-15 08:093.6M
 

 

Martin_Luther_Uebersetzung_1912.txt2014-02-03 00:064.2M

I counted the character (of the pure text) and found 4'016'646 charachters in the TXT-version. The PDF-version is less (3.6M only). How is it possible? 

Thanks for any explanation.

Bruno Meier

 

 

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    1 reply

    Bernd Alheit
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 8, 2020

    This is the result of text compression.

     

     

    bmeierAuthor
    Participant
    March 8, 2020

    Of course!

    But how ist it done?

    Does PDF not need 8 Bit per character?

    Legend
    March 8, 2020

    A PDF uses more space than TXT but then it is compressed. To oversimplify, parts of the file as ZIP compressed. ZIP your text file, it will probably be smaller still.