Compressing the Stacks project

Nick Katz was wondering whether maybe we should distribute USB memory sticks with copies of the stacks project on it. This is completely possible as we can compress the Stacks project to fairly small size files:

-rw-r--r-- 1 johan johan 2.9M Feb 6 21:00 stacks-project.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 johan johan 2.1M Feb 6 21:03 stacks-project.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 johan johan 2.0M Feb 6 21:04 stacks-project.tar.xz
-rw-r--r-- 1 johan johan 1.5M Feb 6 21:32 stacks-project.zpaq

Of course these archives only contain the tex files (more precisely all the files listed when you do git ls-files in your local clone of the stacks-project repository). The smallest one compressed using the zpaq program is just 1546240 bytes. Can your favorite compressor do better?

If we can get it below 1.44 MB then we could hand out floppy disks with a copy of the Stacks project on it!

2 thoughts on “Compressing the Stacks project

    • I believe it’s a very thin version of a CD made of a flexible material that can be used only in paper-thin computers that have yet to be invented. But I could be wrong.

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