Editing Lempel–Ziv–Welch (section)

== Uses ==
LZW compression became the first widely used universal data compression method on computers. A large [[English language|English]] text file can typically be compressed via LZW to about half its original size.

LZW was used in the public-domain program [[compress]], which became a more or less standard utility in [[Unix]] systems around 1986. It has since disappeared from many distributions, both because it infringed the LZW patent and because [[gzip]] produced better compression ratios using the LZ77-based [[DEFLATE]] algorithm, but as of 2008 at least FreeBSD includes both [[compress]] and [[uncompress]] as a part of the distribution. Several other popular compression utilities also used LZW or closely related methods.

LZW became very widely used when it became part of the [[GIF]] image format in 1987. It may also (optionally) be used in [[TIFF]] and [[PDF]] files. (Although LZW is available in [[Adobe Acrobat]] software, Acrobat by default uses [[DEFLATE]] for most text and color-table-based image data in PDF files.)