Encoding Mathematics CSC 2508

This report describes a concise encoding of mathematical formulas based on MathML. A significant reduction in file size can be achieved by using a simple encoding scheme of identifying and reducing all content tags to a length of 8 bits, along with the removal of obvious redundancies, and a final pass through gzip. The encoder can be viewed as a front-end preprocessor to gzip, enabling gzip to achieve higher compression ratios than in its absence. This paradigm of transforming data to suit gzip can be applied to many types of data files. The encoder itself is also fairly extensible, allowing the support of additional markup tags.