I would’ve thought the interesting angle here is about leveraging 1) the 2d space of the page and 2) color in service of compressive encoding.
How to Store Data on Paper?
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#32I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful ( For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this…
It is degrading too fast, microfilm archives need to be digitilized now, the solvent and image chemicals and media are all part of the problem with microfilms. Archival paper is a nice medium that can be stored a long time. This is of course a question of how long you want to store your information if you want to do 00500 years it is probably good. Or just go with metal https://rosettaproject.org/ Or try to create a…
Maybe. Anything that can be photographically etched and is durable enough would work well.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#33I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful ( For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this…
I wonder, as others have said, an easily OCRable font. However, maybe an added compressor, zip type program specially designed for the limited character set.
If we just have text files, and mayve vector graphics for simple schematics, that's a lot of info.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#34[flagged]
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#35I have been thinking about this for a long time. Thanks for the link. The biggest advantage of character-based encodings is that they can be decoded by humans (as opposed to dot-based encodings), which means that you don’t need a camera or a scanner to recover the data. This is an interesting point. In our post apocalyptic future scholars will be using their quills to translate archives of these (in my imagination an…
Adding 3 colors would make it base 5 (BW+rgb) and give log(5)/log(2) or about 2.3 times the information per dot.
2 dots at 5 possibilities each gives 25 (5^2)
2 dots at 2 possibilities each gives 4 (2^2)
They only diverge from there. Or am I doing my math wrong?
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#36There was once work on metalized optical paper tape of very high density for archival purposes -- what happened to that?
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#37(2020)
Compare the quality and intentionality of this writing versus 2025 LLM generated/assisted stuff.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#38I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful ( For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this…
It is degrading too fast, microfilm archives need to be digitilized now, the solvent and image chemicals and media are all part of the problem with microfilms. Archival paper is a nice medium that can be stored a long time. This is of course a question of how long you want to store your information if you want to do 00500 years it is probably good. Or just go with metal https://rosettaproject.org/ Or try to create a…
This. The right paper will last significantly longer than microfilm.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#39Interesting. I am not sure why, for character-based encodings, they used a general-purpose font (Inconsolata) rather than one that is specifically made for OCR -- and how this would have made it better. Going further, if you only print a limited alphabet (16, 32 or 39 symbols) why not use a specialized font with only these characters? The final step is to use a bitmap "font" that simply shows different character valu…
The font choice is discussed here:
https://www.monperrus.net/martin/perfect-ocr-digital-data
From the linked article:
>The optimal font varies very much on the considered engine. Monospaced fonts (aka fixed-width) such as Inconsolata, are more appropriate in general. ocr-a and ocr-b ocrb give really poor results.
I noticed that they liked using lower case letters for bases where that is a choice. I would think that the larger, upper case letters would be better for OCR. Using lower case for either OCR-A or OCR-B would be a poor idea in any case. The good OCR properties are only provided for the upper case letters. The lower case letters were mostly provided for completeness.
Also, the author might be training on entire blocks of characters rather than individual characters. That isn't really want you want here unless you are using something like words for your representation. OCR-A and OCR-B were designed for character by character OCR.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#40I did my own testing of this. I arrived at using very large QR codes with a lot of redundancy. You can scratch them etc and they’ll still read. Also it’s an extremely ubiquitous format and everyone knows what it is by looking at it.