Technology

You could try base64 maybe? The above would be: Z3nFNDK4ut8Em7nYkkpXhd2IckM= (28 chrs)

base64 uses A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and the + and / characters to encode 6 bits per character. That means you can encode every 3 bytes (or 6 hex) in 4 characters (since 3 * 8 bits = 4 * 6 bits). If the data are not a perfect multiple of 3 bytes, the last group of 4 characters gets padded out with = signs.

1. It's a 160-bit hash, so using letters and numbers, it'd be log base (10+26) of 2^160, which is roughly 31. So 31 letters.
2. Using upper and lower case, it'd be log base (10+26+26) of 2^160, or 27 letters.
3. Don't use SHA-1; use SHA-256
4. Upper and lower case to represent SHA-256 would be log base (10+26+26) of 2^256, 43 letters
5. Internally, it's represented using 32 "letters" of 8 bits each, effectively using every possible ASCII character. The string representation is only of consequence when you're exchanging it over a medium where it needs to be robust and human-readable, and probably the benefit from squeezing it down to fewer characters for that representation is not worth the cost in terms of making it unclear how you've chosen to squeeze it and making life difficult for people who are trying to convert to and from the format. Hexadecimal is a little bigger but it's very clear and unambiguous what you've done, whereas using the full alphabet doesn't have that property.

It gets subtle when you consider Unicode. But you said latin alphabet, so you can look at just the UTF-8 section of this table, and assume 1byte = 1letter.

https://github.com/qntm/base32768#base32768

HTH

https://www.unitconverters.net/numbers/decimal-to-base-36.htm

base 10 = 590741618446309885662238049322513167918815539779

base 16 = 6779C53432B8BADF049BB9D8924A5785DD887243

base 36 = C34WAO39N9K9XWPHW5W9XGRH0AHT0CG

Hashing won't fix sloppy typos/grammar.

How much would hash ~~digsets~~ digests be shortened if the whole ~~alphabel~~ alphabet was used ?

Yeah you can always take a hex hash output and convert it to Base64...which does conpress it significantly. Apply LZ Compression and boom.