Thank you for sharing! I would like to get deeper: how many Bytes is possible to write on a paper with this or that encoding, how about having some extra bits for the sake of data loss recovery, what are approaches to a multi-page storages and are there any patches for incremental archiving?

I will try to remove dust from my A4 scanner and try to read that MP3 from printed medium, seems a bit insane to store multimedia in a paper but who needs to store it without proven ability to read. My printers love to mess with ink (especially ones with pirate-refilled cartridge) so I do not really believe this is practically at maximum resolution.

I have been thinking about this for a long time. Thanks for the link.

The biggest advantage of character-based encodings is that they can be decoded by humans (as opposed to dot-based encodings), which means that you don’t need a camera or a scanner to recover the data.

This is an interesting point. In our post apocalyptic future scholars will be using their quills to translate archives of these (in my imagination anyway). Of course they would have to translate into binary and then into human chars.

I can imaging they will be sad they cannot listen to the mp3's.

Adding color allows on to code more information per dot (3x more with three colors).

Is this right? Wouldn't it be base-3 encoding? Three bits of binary can count to 8. Three trits of base three can count to 27. Color has all sorts of disadvantages but maybe a much greater payoff (unless I m mistaken).