Compression, transmission and decompression of gray-tone imagery data includes receiving a gray-tone image suitable for printing at least a portion of a pattern onto a substrate by operation of an electron beam lithography system, aggregating sets of lines of the gray-tone image into trilines, sequentially encoding each of the trilines of the gray-tone image by operation of one or more encoders, the one or more encoders equipped with a codebook configured to store a plurality of triline fragments and a write location and transmitting the encoded trilines of the gray-tone image to a set of decoders of the digital pattern generator via a set of data pathways established between the one or more encoders and each of the decoders.