One degree of freedom not usually exploited in developing high-performance text-processing algorithms is the encoding of the underlying atomic character set. Here we consider a text compression method where the specific character set collating-sequence employed in encoding the text has a big impact on performance. We demonstrate that permuting the standard character collating-sequences yields a small win on Asian-language texts over gzip. We also show improved compression with our method for English texts, although not by enough to beat standard methods. However, we also design a class of artificial languages on which our method clearly beats gzip, often by an order of magnitude.
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