[chrismorgan]

> Maybe a compatibility issue?

From the introduction:

> Even in Byte mode a typical QR-code reader tries to interpret a byte sequence as an UTF-8 or ISO/IEC 8859-1 encoded text. Thus QR-codes cannot be used to encode arbitrary binary data directly.

Back to your comment:

> Base45 is actually not that bad as it seems (3.1% overhead)

That’s very close to my logarithm calculations from edflsafoiewq’s 40-L figures (the log₂₅₆ 45⁴²⁹⁶ bit of my comment, just added). Would you mind explaining to me what I did wrong with my 45³ ÷ 256² calculation that said 39%?

[lifthrasiir]

Oops, I've completely missed the last paragraph and thought that you were giving a wildly larger figure with a wrong assumption. Your actual assumption for optimally-efficient base-45 is correct and close enough to the actual QR code spec.

[chrismorgan]

I’ve been adding bits to my comment as I went. It wasn’t there when you wrote your comment. I’m stopping now and going to go eat, confused about the 39% and 3% and what’s going on. I haven’t worked with QR codes enough!