Since the dawn of computing, there have been various attempts by man to squeeze 10 lbs. into a 5 lb. bag. With this, we have the zip compression algorithm, JPEG, MPEG, MP3, tar gz, OGG and many many others. Most of these compression algorithms tend to be very efficient and effective. Recently, while using the console zip command to zip up some files on my workstation at work, I discovered that Adobe must write their own shoddy compression algorithm as well as their own shoddy software.

This is the Save As dialogue box as it appears on my workstation. Notice the Use Compression tickmark? I have saved six files in Illustrator. One of them is not compressed, the other five are compressed using this method. Running these files through the zip command yields the following:

leetbox:~/Desktop binarybadass$ zip -r -9 files.zip ./Files/
adding: Files/ (stored 0%)
adding: Files/File1.ai (deflated 19%)
adding: Files/File2.ai (deflated 81%)
adding: Files/File3.ai (deflated 11%)
adding: Files/File4.ai (deflated 11%)
adding: Files/File5.ai (deflated 8%)
adding: Files/File6.ai (deflated 13%)

As you can clearly see here, the wonky compression algorithm used by Adobe pales in comparison to what the zip algorithm can do. File2.ai is obviously the file that is uncompressed because of the larger file size.