As with all compression algorithm, there is an 'entropy' which is the mininum length (or max compression) you can achieve by eliminating extra information. Beyond that, you can achieve better compression for some particular string by causing other strings to expand, ie, you have two set: compressed strings and expanded strings. It is a give-and-take. Thus, the idea is that if we do have a compression algorithm, then we want to have the more oftenly occured string to be in the compressed set. Thus, an rearrangment algorithm like LSB which basically rearrange the certain characters so that it can be compressed better is generally a good idea. OTOH, we do not know whether this rearragement will produce better compression in the long run. It may turn out that those strings which falls in the expanded strings set is more oftenly used in future. There is always a holy grail of compression. And we could spend donkey years arguing over it and never get to our goal, ie, IDN. Lets not forget that and hopefully we can get IDN in a timely fashion. -James Seng
