Ascii85, also called Base85, is a form of binary-to-text encoding developed by Paul E. Rutter for the btoa utility. By using five ASCII characters to represent four bytes of binary data (making the encoded size 1⁄4 larger than the original, assuming eight bits per ASCII character), it is more efficient than uuencode or Base64, which use four characters to represent three bytes of data (1⁄3 increase, assuming eight bits per ASCII character).
Its main modern uses are in Adobe's PostScript and Portable Document Format file formats, as well as in the patch encoding for binary files used by Git.[1]