ASCII85 or Base85 is a binary to text encoding system.
ASCII85 (Base85) is a binary to text encoding system created by Paul E. Rutter. ASCII85 encoding is compatible with 7-bit and 8-bit MIME. ASCII85 is used in PostScript (PS) and Portable Document Format (PDF) file formats.
ASCII85 is similar to Base64, It uses 5 ASCII characters to code 4 bytes of binary data whereas in Base64 4 characters are used to code 3 bytes. ASCII85 has less overhead than Base64 as the ASCII85 encoded data size is ¹⁄₄ larger than the original size compared to ¹⁄₃ increase if encoded by Base64.
