Need help on presentation: How many bytes in page of text? (1 Viewer)

[Vince Maskeeper]

Ok, not quite that literally.

What i'm doing is this:
I'm doing a presenattion on digital compression schemes and their importance. In introducing the concept- I express the sizes of various images, sound and video files in uncompressed formats. Although the numbers are impressive, I'd like to equate them into real figures.

For example, I'd like to say
"3.blah megabytes, that's enough space to save the Bible 42 times over" or whatever. I couldn't find any decent examples of this online, so I thought I would ask here is anyone knew figures like this, or where I could find them.

-vince

 

[Alex Spindler]

Vince, the best place to go is Project Guttenberg. There you have some electronic versions of some recognizable works and you can get a good example. They're usually in plain text format so you don't get all the fat that a .doc adds to documents.

For example, they've got the Old and New Testament at about 4.24 MB plain text or 1.34MB zipped. The Odyssey is 761 KB and War and Peace is 3.13 MB.

Oh, and don't forget that 1 gigabyte is not 1000 megabytes.

 

[RobertR]

I think there are places where you can find out the approximate number of words in a novel. If you can do that, you simply multiply that by the number of letters in the average word, which I remember reading was five.

 

[Mark Shannon]

Well in any case, I know that in Visual Basic, one letter represents one byte. So one Kilobyte is 1000 letters, and so on, and so forth.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

1024 actually.

And it isnt specific to VB 1 byte = one character, this 8 bit encoding is standard from most computer systems.