Document Archiving

TIFF over ITU-T Group 4 FAX Compression (CCITT T.6)

Really smooth way of compressing scanned documents. It must be the best way there is, actually. I've had quite some difficulties with finding the optimal way of archiving A4 documents (meaning bitmap compression before it turns PDF*). Until I found this one, the LZW compression over TIFF was the best I found. But still, I kept on wondering how some has gotten them to become so tiny. There just had to be some better way of compression, I thought.

Today I found my answers. Reading from this article, I understand that fax machines uses this compression world-wide. B/W images only, makes sense. Weee, another great — personal — discovery has come to my reach, although this ITU-T Group [fax] compression seems to have been around since the late 60's. And the T.6 version (that I use) has been in use since the same year as I was born :)

It's unbelievable how small the image gets. I tried just painting a 1x1 inch area wave with the brush, saving/compressing. The testresult.TIF ended up at 346 bytes(!). Amazing, isn't it? ;)

digitalpreservation.gov/