Chunks are the building blocks in the IFF structure. The form expressed as a C typedef is: typedef struct { ID ckID; /* 4 character ID */ LONG ckSize; /* sizeof(ckData) */ UBYTE ckData[/* ckSize */]; } Chunk; We can diagram an example chunk - a "CMAP" chunk containing 12 data bytes - like this: +------------------+ - ckID: | "CMAP" | | |------------------+ | ckSize: | 12 | | - |------------------+ | ckData: | | 0, 0, 0, 32 | 20 bytes 12 |------------------+ | bytes | 0, 0, 64, 0 | | | |------------------+ | | | 0, 0, 64, 0 | | - +------------------+ - That's 4 bytes of ckID, 4 bytes of ckSize and 12 data bytes. The total space used is 20 bytes. The ckID identifies the format and purpose of the chunk. As a rule, a program must recognize ckID to interpret ckData. It should skip over all unrecognized chunks. The ckID also serves as a format version number as long as we pick new IDs to identify new formats of ckData (see above). The following ckIDs are universally reserved to identify chunks with particular IFF meanings: LIST, FORM, PROP, CAT , and " ". The special ID " " (4 spaces) is a ckID for "filler" chunks, that is, chunks that fill space but have no meaningful contents. The IDs "LIS1" through "LIS9", "FOR1" through "FOR9", and "CAT1" through "CAT9" are reserved for future "version number" variations. All IFF-compatible software must account for these chunk IDs. The ckSize is a logical block size - how many data bytes are in ckData. If ckData is an odd number of bytes long, a 0 pad byte follows which is not included in ckSize. (Cf. Alignment.) A chunk's total physical size is ckSize rounded up to an even number plus the size of the header. So the smallest chunk is 8 bytes long with ckSize = 0. For the sake of following chunks, programs must respect every chunk's ckSize as a virtual end-of-file for reading its ckData even if that data is malformed, e.g., if nested contents are truncated. We can describe the syntax of a chunk as a regular expression with "#" representing the ckSize, the length of the following {braced} bytes. The "[0]" represents a sometimes needed pad byte. (The regular expressions in this document are collected in Appendix A along with an explanation of notation.) Chunk ::= ID #{ UBYTE* } [0] One chunk output technique is to stream write a chunk header, stream write the chunk contents, then random access back to the header to fill in the size. Another technique is to make a preliminary pass over the data to compute the size, then write it out all at once.