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Old 23rd Jun 2012, 10:41 pm   #17
DragonForce
Retired Dormant Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Bristol, UK.
Posts: 168
Default Re: Digital hard copy?

Quote:
Originally Posted by G8HQP Dave View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by DragonForce
84 million characters at 6 thousand a page is around 14,000 pages.
I thought it was 84M bits? That would be around 10M characters if you had an 8-bit character set with clearly distinguishable characters for each bit pattern. If you just wanted 0s and 1s then you would be using a very inefficient coding method, but one with plenty of redundancy so a garbled character could probably still be read OK: manual/optical ECC!
Yeah, that would be true - but the OP wanted to print it out as binary, so 84 megabit is still 84 million characters - each bit being 1 or 0.

If you printed it out as hex, then the numbers change - 8 bits to a byte, each byte being represented by a two digit number 00 - FF (0 to 255 in decimal).

If you then take the 10 million characters and represent as hex, you're looking at printing 20 million characters, assuming you don't need a separation character between the values (a "," say). Even at 20 million characters, you're still looking at a huge amount of printed paper.
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