Coding of Devanagari Composite Character Patterns for Data Compression

Data compression methods have been tried on Devanagari character patterns, which are mainly used for output printing from computer. Various schemes have been tried aiming at smallest amount of data storage, and ease of implementation. A 24×16 dot matrix representation has been used for Devanagari fonts.An alphabet set of 140 Devanagari composite characters accounting for more than 98% of the total usage is chosen for analysis. It is found that hybrid runlength coding can give a storage saving of around 42% while sub-block coding using Huffman strategy results in a saving of around 67%. Schemes with better compression ratios are suggested.