In one embodiment, the present patent application comprises a method and apparatus to generate low rate protographs from high rate protographs, comprising copying a base graph; permuting end points of edges of a same type in copies of the base graph to produce a permuted graph; and pruning systematic input nodes in the permuted graph and the edges connected to them. In another embodiment, the present patent application comprises a method and apparatus to generate high-rate codes from low-rate codes, comprising puncturing a subset of codeword bits, wherein the step of puncturing a subset of codeword bits comprises regular-irregular puncturing the subset of codeword bits, random puncturing variable nodes, or progressive node puncturing variable nodes to obtain a desired code from a preceding code.