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Monday, February 13, 2006

Compression Software Basics

I just received an email from one of our readers and she had problems opening the file she downloaded from the previous post about Klonoa, she said that the file is neither PDF nor PDO but LZH.

I'm going to to a brief discussion on this problem, the LZH file is not a different kind of paper craft pattern but instead it is a compression file and is also known as an archive file, what this means is that the provider of the paper craft pattern has used a compression software to compress the PDF file, they do this so that it would be easily downloaded or for those people who do not have a fast internet connection or simply those who use 56kb dial-up internet. The LZH compression file acts as a container that holds the PDF or PDO file and at the same time trimming down the overall size of the file. So, how do we open this file? Well, will get there in a minute.

First, I'll enumerate some compression/archive file extensions commonly used for paper craft patterns.
  1. ZIP
  2. RAR
  3. LZH
There are a lot of file compression/archive formats out there but we can't discuss all of them since most of them are rarely used, instead we will focus our attention on the three formats that are widely used, but if you want to read about all of the different formats here's a helpful link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archive_formats

Now, we go into opening this archives. The two most popular compression/archive software out there is Winzip, followed by WinRAR. This two do exactly the same thing, they compress, archive, and decompress files. The only difference is the way they do it, but were not going there since that is very technical and not really necessary. Winzip and WinRAR can open all of the popular archive formats (ZIP, RAR, LZH, etc...) but can cost you between $30 - $50.

Lucky for you I like free stuff, so here it is:

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

7-zip is a free compression/archive software, owned and hosted by 7-zip.org, it can do whatever Winzip and WinRAR can do, and have I mentioned that it's FREE.
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