  We discuss the interest of escort distributions and R\'enyi entropy in the
context of source coding. We first recall a source coding theorem by Campbell
relating a generalized measure of length to the R\'enyi-Tsallis entropy. We
show that the associated optimal codes can be obtained using considerations on
escort-distributions. We propose a new family of measure of length involving
escort-distributions and we show that these generalized lengths are also
bounded below by the R\'enyi entropy. Furthermore, we obtain that the standard
Shannon codes lengths are optimum for the new generalized lengths measures,
whatever the entropic index. Finally, we show that there exists in this setting
an interplay between standard and escort distributions.
