tekhedd’s Lossy Word Shortener (s7r)
February 21st, 2025Let’s face it, you don’t really read all those big words. You glance at the sentence, and your mind fills in the rest. Those words don’t need to be so big, they can be shorter. And their meaning can be recovered from context. I’m not talking about just removing a few vowels or a contraction, I’m talking about i18n, a11y, and other recent abbreviations. I call this lossy shortening.
Enter the lossy word shortener. Available as Python or Javascript source code, you can quickly shorten words to save on data, use less screen real estate on your page, and make text faster and easier(??) to read!
Downloads
It’s Just A Small Thing
But very powerful. A highly efficient text compression algorithm, in only a few lines of code. Amazing!
That’s a nice sentence! But does it need to be so long? Let’s see what happens when I put that sentence through the lossy shortener with the default target length of 4:
But very p6l. A h4y e7t text c9n a7m, in only a few l3s of code. A5g!
Look how much space you saved! And easy to read. For higher legibility you can only encode the longest, most space-wasting words:
But very p6l. A highly e7t text c9n a7m, in only a few lines of code. Amazing!
Or you can shorten to the max, for the most efficient writing possible!
But v2y p6l. A h4y e7t t2t c9n a7m, in o2y a few l3s of c2e. A5g!
Most people can’t tell the difference and will simply read through, using context to restore the meaning. Think of the time and space savings!
