But for larger fonts it can be dozens or hundreds of times as efficient. This is an efficient form of shape compression. Since our characters are standardized, it is pretty easy to do. This compression works great as long as what is being encoded is a standard shape. It gets trickier, or impossible, if it is not.
Lets look at the following image.
This is about the same size as the mouse cursor, or a small icon. Using our shape tables we could draw that same picture with 3 shapes. But this is only the beginning. There are many images that don't fit well into that category. Also, because of the complexity of some drawings, it is very hard to break things down well after the fact.