roy g biv
Ready Rangers Liberation Front [7]
April 2005
Microsoft like to produce new file formats with more and more content. CHM files allow a single file to contain HTML pages, including graphics and scripts, something like an archive. They are very careful, though, to avoid documenting anything, so to create such files generally relies on their tools. CHMs carry all of the content in a single stream, compressed by the LZX algorithm. It is almost a solid archive, but contains a periodic state reset, to make the decompression faster (because it is not necessary to decompress the entire archive to reach the last file, but start from the last reset point and decompress from there).