Binary vs ASCII GDSII formats

 

ASCII file format has many advantages, such as:

 

• easy to edit, grep, search, etc; there are many external tools available for text files;
• easy to browse through, flexibility of ASCII parser allows for easily readable text formatting;
• easy to create, both manually and programmatically;
• easy to write tools for extracting information from a text file;
• no 16-bit field, 32-bit data and other limitations of the binary format.
• text files have better compression ratio; in many cases compressed ASCII file is smaller than corresponding compressed binary GDSII file. For example, storing ASCII files on a compressed drive or directory takes less space than storing corresponding binary GDSII files.

 

The biggest disadvantage of ASCII format is much slower parsing. The flexibility of text format requires parser to do far more work than in case of a rigid binary format.