the compression routines used by gzip and ZIP are generic text compression techniques,
Actually, the Flate algorithm is a "general purpose" compression algorithm - it is no better on text than on binary data.
they don't understand interleaved formats (commonly used for RGB data, stereo audio etc.) nor multi-byte representations such as the 32-bit IEEE floats we might be using in a few years in The GIMP so they produce rather poor results compared to specialised compression techniques which The GIMP could inherit from existing Free Software.
But you are right, using optimized algorithms is always a good thing.
I don't think you'd find anything (non-patented) that is going to do better on RGB/CMYK pixel data and still maintain reasonable performance.
Leonard -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> <http://www.lazerware.com>
