IBM Lotus Symphony BETA - Free

Posted by quant
Oct 17, 2007 at 03:57 PM

Chris Thompson wrote:
>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

great reply!

I also had a look at your book, Graham. Your book actually is a database. You could maybe ask some database specialist to look at it, and they’d create a database from your book. Then you could sell it in a database format ... or you could have it online, and customers could query (for a fee) data they would require. For example someone would be interested only on Address format from any country ... others would like to see all info about certain county ... all these would be simple queries to the database with output on the website. Or maybe another tool could be address formatter ... user would input address, choose country ... and your website would return the address formatted for a given country ... and many other stuff like that ...