improves on LZ77 by using a 1-bit flag to indicate whether the next chunk of data is a literal or a length–distance pair, and using literals if a length–distance pair would be longer. In the PalmDoc format, a length–distance pair is always encoded by a two-byte sequence. Of the 16 bits that make up these two bytes, 11 bits go to encoding the distance, 3 go to encoding the length, and the remaining two are used to make sure the decoder can identify the first byte as the beginning of such a two-byte sequence. In the implementation used for many games by Electronic Arts, the size in bytes of a length–distance pair can be specified inside the first byte of the length–distance pair itself; depending on whether the first byte begins with a 0, 10, 110, or 111 (when read in big-endian bit orientation), the length of the entire length–distance pair can be 1 to 4 bytes. , the most popular LZ77-based compression method is DEFLATE; it combines LZSS with Huffman coding. Literals, lengths, and a symbol to indicate the end of the current block of data are all placed together into one alphabet. Distances can be safely placed into a separate alphabet; because a distance only occurs just after a length, it cannot be mistaken for another kind of symbol or vice versa. LZ78 The LZ78 algorithms compress sequential data by building a dictionary of token sequences from the input, and then replacing the second and subsequent occurrence of the sequence in the data stream with a reference to the dictionary entry. The observation is that the number of repeated sequences is a good measure of the non random nature of a sequence. The algorithms represent the dictionary as an n-ary tree where n is the number of tokens used to form token sequences. Each dictionary entry is of the form , where index is the index to a dictionary entry representing a previously seen sequence, and token is the next token from the input that makes this entry unique in the dictionary. Note how the algorithm is greedy, and so nothing is added to the table until a unique making token is found. The algorithm is to initialize last matching index = 0 and next available index = 1 and then, for each token of the input stream, the dictionary searched for a match: . If a match