Why Hex Encoding Exists Alongside Base64
Hex encoding represents each byte as exactly two hexadecimal characters (0-9, A-F) — a direct, fixed-ratio mapping that trades compactness for transparency: every byte maps to exactly 2 characters, always, with no grouping math required to see the underlying byte boundaries, unlike Base64's 3-bytes-to-4-characters packing (see Base64 vs Hex for the full size comparison).
This direct byte-to-character correspondence is exactly why hex remains the standard for anywhere a human needs to read or manually compare byte-level data — hash digests, color codes, memory dumps, and low-level protocol debugging all use hex specifically because you can visually map a hex pair back to its byte value without decoding a denser alphabet first.
Converting text to hex first requires deciding on a character encoding (almost always UTF-8) to turn the string into bytes, since hex encoding operates on raw bytes, not characters directly — the same consideration that applies to Base64 encoding of text.