IBM Lotus Symphony BETA - Free

Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 17, 2007 at 03:27 PM

This is actually an interesting discussion. That Word barely can sort of handle the task by only loading portions of the document at a time is beside the point, really. The reason you’re having various degrees of speed issues using most conventional word processors to edit a document of this size is precisely because they’re not tools designed for this kind of job.

Think about it… a 1100 page document, in terms of text content, is only about 500,000 words, or about 2.3 megabytes of text. That should be nothing for a modern computer to deal with. I open text files of that size in text editors all the time, and applications dealing with orders of magnitude more data in other contexts don’t have to resort to kludges like only loading a portion of the document. That conventional word processors can’t slice through documents of this size like butter is because they’re designed for a particular task: small to medium size documents with unstructured formatting, and all the internal bloat that comes along for the ride.

Most of the long document tools use a different approach, with text being the core thing being edited, and styling and advanced features being attached through some method of tagging (as if you stripped out all the formatting stuff in Word except the styles drop down box). Whether the final layout it done by the publisher or by the user is really an orthogonal issue, though it usually gets dragged into these debates.

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing a version of Word optimized for long documents, but I doubt it will ever happen.

—Chris

Graham Rhind wrote:
>So those parts of the process are never a
>requirement - just the storing and manipulation of the text, tables and graphics.
>Word (and I’m talking about Word 2000 and its predecessor) has a clever way of opening
>large documents by opening only part of them and then opening other sections later as
>you scroll down. Other programs try to load the whole document in one go, which meant in
>my case I could have decorated my office whilst waiting.
> >And, as I mentioned, I don’t
>find Word aggravating and I do find it reliable. Naturally it won’t suit everybody,
>but what software does?
>