>You can try using Huffman encoding.
>The idea is to represent the highest occurring characters
>with least number of bits.
>Highest occurring characters for English text would be R,S,T,L,N etc.

The most common character in the English language is " " :-)
This is worth noting when you are using Huffman coding or any other code
which depends on symbol frequency.
"e" features very high also.

Look at apps like eg PKZIP which has a number of algorithms depending on
structure.of source data.

Consider using less bits per character and packing the "words" into bytes.
Baudot teletypes used 5 bits (32 symbols) which allows 26 letters plus 2
shift characters (shift to set a, shift to set B) giving a total of 48
working characters.
Baudot didn't use upper/lower case AFAIR but there is enough room in 48
chars to do so. This becomes perhaps inefficient IF you have lots of mixed
case eg "McMahon" :-) but is good for normal cpitalisation.

eg    "Hello, my name is Russell."
= 25 characters = 26 bytes normally. Using above scheme this become
But
where > means use second set (capitals and punctuation etc)

 = ">h<ello my name is >r<ussell>.<"

=  31 x 5 bits = 155 bits = 193/8 = 20 bytes
Actually, I'm a bit scrambled here as I haven't well thought out the upper
case handling. Still, some indication of modest gains possible.
Max poss = 37.5% less than raw text.
Not good enough.

I think that about 2:1 is achievable without really fancy efforts.

Try Huffman.

      Russell McMahon
_____________________________

>From other worlds - www.easttimor.com
                                www.sudan.com

What can one man* do?
Help the hungry at no cost to yourself!
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(* - or woman, child or internet enabled intelligent entity :-))