1. A method for compression encoding the digital representation of a character having a boundary, the encoding including escape codes, the character being recreated over a plurality of consecutive scanlines, the location of the boundary on three consecutive scanlines being x.sub.1, x.sub.2, and x.sub.3, including the steps of predetermining the second difference for each intersection of a character boundary with a scanline, providing the second difference (x.sub.2 -x.sub.1)-(x.sub.3 -x.sub.2) of the location of the boundary for relatively small second differences, representing by an escape code the starting locations for the new character boundaries relative to the last position in the scanline generated, and using an escape code to terminate the extension of character boundaries into the next scanline.