Best ZIP compressor?

In My Humble Opinion
1

A friend of mine, who still does some work on an old DOS box, compressed an image with XTree Gold’s built-in compressor and squashed that sucker down about half a meg tighter than I’ve been able to manage on my Win98 system.

I cannot get XTree to work on my system (I suspect it’s got to do with the 32 bit file structure, but I’m not sure. If I do sucessfully get it to load, it doesn’t see any file, just directory headers. And the only way I can get it to even load is from Safe-Mode, Command Prompt Only.)

Anyway, now my buddy’s being smug that his system has a better compression utility than mine, and I’m not puttin’ up with that! (and you thought nerds were uncompetitive!):smiley:

Anyone have a suggestion for a really, really good zip program? I don’t care about ease of use, I’m perfectly comfortable with dos shells. All I care about is output file size. Every search I’ve done has come up with “very friendly interface” or “wonderfully user-friendly”. I don’t care if it’s user-hostile: I want compression, dammit!

Any suggestions?

Fenris

2

I think this is what you’re looking for:

http://web.act.by.net/~act/act-canterbury.html

3

I just put my hard drive on an anvil and hit it with a hammer.

I think my hammer may be infected with a computer virus, though… my hard drive never works well after I do this.

4

When you say zip compressor, I assume you mean any compression utility, not just one that is pkzip compatible.
To really win in the compression game it helps to have a utility optimised for the data you are compressing. What is it, wave files? Use Mpeg Audio Layer 3 (mp3)
32bit bitmaps? Try jpeg.

Otherwise, I’m partial to bzip2. It has significantly better compressions rates than pkzip and variants, or so I’ve found.

5

Results of compressing http://www.straightdope.com/index.html

original
12971 index.html
compress
6854 compress.html.Z
zip (on maximum compression - level 9)
4698 pkzip.zip
gzip
4579 gzip.html.gz
bzip2
4505 bzip2.html.bz2

6

I happen to be very fond of WinACE as of late. Perhaps it is because of the cool graphics, but it seems to work well, too!

7

Show me the ratio. :slight_smile:
How does WinACE do on my sample text file?

BTW, slightly off-topic, but I’ve often wondered about increasing HTML efficiency. Is there any reason that the server could not send a query to the client to request existence of a compressor optimized for HTML tags (say, where each tag had a two-byte code, with additional bytes for options if necessary, and usual text compression) then engage in all further file transfers using a compressed version of the file? The server could have compressed and uncompressed side by side in directories so it wouldn’t have any additional CPU load.
As for me, I tend to strip extraneous white space out of pages I won’t be editing much, but that’s hardly as big a saver as reducing web page sizes by a factor of 5 or 6 (just ordinary compression above obviously does a factor of 3 easily)