About the Base85 Decode
This tool decodes Adobe ASCII85 to text. It accepts input with or without the <~ ~> delimiters, expands the z shorthand back into four zero bytes, and ignores whitespace so wrapped input from a PDF works. The decoded bytes are shown as UTF-8 text.
A character outside the ASCII85 range (printable ASCII from ! to u) is reported as an error. The usual culprit is a stray angle bracket left over from the delimiters, or a hyphen picked up when the stream was copied out of a diff. The final group deserves attention too: a tail of a single character is invalid, because one character cannot carry even one byte, so a truncated copy fails here rather than quietly producing a wrong byte.
Content pulled from a PDF is usually binary and often Flate-compressed on top of the ASCII85 layer, so readable text is the exception and noise is the norm. Treat the result as bytes and keep going: Zlib Decompress or Gzip Decompress is commonly the next step for a PDF stream. The Base85 Encode tool produces this format.
How to use
- Paste the ASCII85 string.
- Read the decoded text.
- Delimiters and z shorthand are handled for you.
Common questions
- Do I need the delimiters?
- No. The decoder works with or without <~ and ~>.
- It says a character is invalid. Why?
- ASCII85 uses only the printable range ! to u. A character outside it, or a stray letter, triggers the error.
- Why is my decoded PDF data unreadable?
- It is binary content, not text. ASCII85 in PDFs usually wraps compressed streams.