COMPRESSION OF WISWESSER LINE NOTATIONS USING VARIETY GENERATION

The use of variety generation for reversible text compression is described briefly, and it is shown how the technique may be applied to compress Wiswesser Line Notations. The notations may be compressed, using 8-bit codes to represent variable-length character strings, to occupy an average of just under 3.6 bits per original character, an improvement of just over 55% on a fixed-length representation using 8 bits per character. This is similar to the amount of compression given by the same technique on natural language texts. © 1979, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.