A file compressor is great for shrinking stored files, but it depresses me whenever I see a file grow instead of shrink. So what I am looking for is a file compression algorithm that never inflates any files, although it is allowed that some files (not all of course!) have the same length after "compression". Ideally it should work on files of all sizes, but I would be satisfied with a compressor that operates only on files larger than 1MB. Can you provide such an algorithm? No programming knowledge is required for this problem.

This gives a simple but clear dissertation of compressing text. 

http://www.howstuffworks.com/file-compression.htm

There is a wealth of material freely available on compression algorithms; I found out why my jpg files are smaller than the size my scanner reports before a scan to saving as a jpg file.

Posted by brianjn on 2006-10-20 21:32:33