Compressing AFP...

I have become interested in a scheme for compressing PDF into an AFP stream.

This would be useful for applying color transforms "up front" of the conversion to AFP (rather than in AFP or out of AFP).

The idea is along the lines of this.

However, in the world of PDF documents some changes would be necessary.  First off, the data being examined has somewhat different properties than the images FITSIO is trying to compress.  Sequential images of planets and gas nebula are unlike sequential images of bank statements.   Another difference is that we can assume basically unlimited CPU/disk for parallelization.  Finally, there is no "transmission" requirement to send the images long distances via radio.

Though AFP supports tiling directly as an IOCA image construct my feeling is that its not a commonly used construct and that making the tiles more general, i.e., full IOCA images on their own, would be a much better idea.

Another element of this is reuse of tiles.  Business documents tend to be constructed from templates with a long-running stream of pages, i.e., a mail stream, containing a small number of templates.  Within each type of template individual changes occupy a relatively small portion of the document.

The only catch is that you have to be able to quickly determine the reuse level of each tile...