We report on a new experimental analysis of high-order entropy-compressed suffix arrays, which retains the theoretical performance of previous work and represents an improvement in practice. Our experiments indicate that the resulting text index offers state-of-the-art compression. In particular, we require roughly 20% of the original text size--without requiring a separate instance of the text. We can additionally use a simple notion to encode and decode block-sorting transforms (such as the This article is an extended version of Grossi et al. [2004] (invited for this special issue) and of Foschini et al. [2004]. Support for L. Foschini was provided in part by Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. Support for R. Grossi was provided in part by the Italian MIUR. Support for A. Gupta was provided in part by the Army Research Office through grant DAAD19-03