Talk:Ascii85

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I think Base85 would be a more natural name for this article.

The German wikipedia has a more complete article titled Base85 at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base85 which should be reconciled with this one. (But I can't read German to any significant degree, so I'm not a good candidate for doing so.)

A version of Base85 is used in the Git system.

A version of Base85 for encoding IPv6 addresses is defined in RFC 1924 (published April 1, 1996).

64.81.70.227 02:13, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

"A version of Base85 is used in the Git system." Really? Where? I don't believe that's true. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 22:59, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

The Ascii85 encoding as it is described on Wikipedia and in the PLRM produces incorrect output for trailing bytes. See:

[Example of how the specification fails http://www.suehappycowboy.org/blog/?p=63]

The main page should include a description that accounts for this blunder as well as the correct algorithm to correctly generate Ascii85 data.

Ascii85 is a better name because the characters used in the encoding are sequential in the Ascii table. Base64 reorders the characters. Also, the PLRM refers to it as Ascii85.

The specification doesn't fail, it just doesn't give a detailed explanation of how to write a correct decoder. The standard programming trick (pad with maximum "u" characters to compensate for the rounding-down effect of truncation) is already in the article.

As for the name, I don't think much of the sequential argument, looking at the relative popularity of Adobe's usage and the original btoa, I think that's the most common name these days. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 22:59, 7 January 2008 (UTC)