Dear users,
We are proud to introduce Reflate, the essential part of our new Advanced Codec Pack (.pa)!
Reflate was designed in-house, by our compression engineer Eugene Shelwien. The main requirement for reflate was to address the needs of today’s corporate environment, where the most used formats in exchange are PDF, DOCX and other Microsoft/Open Office formats.
What is it?
Reflate is an advanced re-compression filter designed to improve the compression of files with deflate streams. It removes outdated compression used in these files and then restores it losslessly (without losing any data). Obvious examples are formats such as pdf, docx, xlsx, swf, png, zip, that use deflate as compression codec. With reflate, PowerArchiver will automatically detect files that can be pre-processed by reflate and use the reflate filter, without any interaction required by the user, to compress the formats even more! More advanced users can specifically select reflate to be applied on all of their files and test various different settings with it, to find the best compression rate and speed that works for them. Reflate can work up to 7 levels of nested deflate streams! For example, a ZIP file may contain a .docx file with a png image inside and reflate will correctly detect and compress everything further.
Compression examples
The most common use of reflate is for PDF and Office files (docx, xlsx, etc). In many cases, reflate will enable up to 50% better compression of these files, which is a significant feat that can’t be matched by any of our competitors such as WinZip or WinRAR. Please take a look at the three PDF examples below, using information which we have gathered from publicly available websites (in this case, a public company’s financial releases which are always in PDF format).
Above examples are of PDF files that can be compressed well and we estimate that an average PDF will be compressed between 30% and 50% (up to 85% if mostly text) when using reflate, while DOCX files which usually contain more text can be compressed up to 70% on average. On the other hand, examples that won’t work well with reflate are ones that have large jpg images embedded inside. PowerArchiver 2017 will still, by far, offer the best compression for these files. However, the compression gain will most likely be between 15% and 20%.
PowerArchiver 2017 with Advanced Codec Pack (.PA) will first be available to our most dedicated users, ones with an active PowerArchiver Select plan, as a preview version. The Advanced Codec Pack will be a free add-on for users with an active PowerArchiver Select plan. Once PowerArchiver 2017 is released, you may test it out on your PDF/DOCX files and let us know of your own experiences. The Advanced Codec Pack (.pa) is going to be constantly improved with additions of new codecs and filters. Thank you for being our users since 1998!
