How to Store Data on Paper?

by Martin Monperrus How to print my voice? How to put music on paper? How to print an executable program? All this boils down to storing digital data on paper. This is also called paper data storage. Arrived in this domain from poetry, I’ve been investigating the area for some time. Here is what I found. What to print on paper? Printing an executable program (encoded in base64) Printing a secret message (encrypted with GPG-AES256, encoded as stacked qrcode). Printing a 21 seconds soundscape of a rugby match (in 64kpbs MP3 encoded with Optar) Printing a 7-page scientific paper on a single page (a PDF file encoded with colorsafe) How to transform digital data to a printable format? You need a format that transforms a sequence of bytes into an image with a specific encoding. Then, you need two pieces of software, one encoder (data->image) and one decoder (image->decoder). We now review different kinds of encodings. Character-based encodings TL;DR; OCR digital data is a ve ... Read full article.