Most adaptive-dictionary-based techniques have their roots in two landmark papers by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel in 1977 and 1978 . These papers provide two different approaches to adaptively building dictionaries, and each approach has given rise to a number of variations. The approaches based on the 1977 paper are said to belong to the LZ77 family (also known as LZ1), while the approaches based on the 1978 paper are said to belong to the LZ78, or LZ2, family
The LZ77 Approach
The LZ77 approach implicitly assumes that like patterns will occur close together. It makes use of this structure by using the recent past of the sequence as the dictionary for encoding
However, this means that any pattern that recurs over a period longer than that covered by the coder window will not be captured. The worst-case situation would be where the sequence to be encoded was periodic with a period longer than the search buffer