I suppose you could, but you would have to come up with your own scheme, and it probably would not be very efficient or quick when you were done. I don't know a lot about how compacting routines are coded, but one thing I believe they do is to look for things like multiple spaces in a row, which they change to a simple marker that records how many spaces there where, so that the number of spaces can be restored when the file is uncompacted.

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Marty