Abstract: A process for compressing data describing the layout of integrated circuits so that the layout information can be readily communicated over conventional telephone lines at substantially increased speeds and, hence, at substantially reduced cost. As applied to integrated circuits that have been designed with computer-aided design (CAD) methods, the process includes the steps of assigning unique tokens to describe selected geometrical attributes of sets of polygonal shapes, which tokens ordinarily are less than a single byte of binary information. For example, a token can be used to signify that the x-direction coordinates of a second polygon are all spaced from respective ones of the x-direction coordinates of a first polygon by the given distance.