I have learned alot about computers since we got one. But one thing still vexes me.
I can store seemingly an incredible number of JPEG and other images on my CD-ROM. But when I try to store Wordpad and other text documents, I use up all the room on the disc almost immediately. This is especially troubling because our printer runs out of ink quickly. And with the expensive price of ink cartridges, it would be better if I had a way of storing the data. Floppy discs fill up pretty quick too, you know.
The microsoft .doc format can be a little bloated - drag one into notepad sometime and see just how much there is in the way formatting and control codes and instructions.
Much of it depends what you’re putting into your documents, of course; enlarging a font won’t make the file bigger, text should only make it grow slowly, embedded graphics will cause it to bloat quickly.
Try saving a test document in a number of different formats (RTF, for example) and compare the file sizes.
One other thing; if you’re adding Jpegs to a multisession CD, you use up space more gradually than if you open a file off the CD, edit it and save the new version back as a new session; this is because the existing version cannot be overwritten (on a CDR) and becomes dead space.
I have one more question that hopefully someone out there can answer. I know I am going to shock everyone with my lack of computer expertise when I ask this, but here goes. When you save your data on CD-ROM, is there any advantage to saving it as a “folder”? All I know is that this makes it easy to copy it from your computer to disc. You just put everything you want in a folder and drag the icon to your CD burner section. There is also something known as a compressed or “zipped” folder.
In theory, there shouldn’t be any disadvantage in saving it as a folder, if that’s more convenient. However, it may depend on the format of the CD on which you’re storing it - a while back I wrote a backup program that would store copies of some network folders on a CDRW that was configured for packet writing (which in theory should make it behave something like a removable hard drive) - what I was finding was that writing a folder tree and files, then deleting it and rewriting etc was resulting in ‘lost’ space which was not reclaimed by the deletion process - eventually the disc would say that there was only a few Kb of usable space on it, even when completely empty and I would have to reformat it.
I never did get to the bottom of why this was happening, so I changed my strategy and zipped the folder structure into a single Winzip archive and stored that single file on the CDRW - deleting and rewriting a single large file on a packet CDRW does not appear to cause the same problem.
I find it difficult to accept that documents are filling up your disks so fast. I’ve never been able to put together a document more than a few Megabytes. What are the typical file sizes for these things?
I have several documents which are approaching 50-70 MB. Maybe you don’t write anything important enough.
But seriously…MS Word is incredibly bloated, which can be demonstrated by the fact that I just zipped 3 Word Documents at a total of 130 MB down to 5 MB as a test. Storing pictures in the document as an uncompressed bitmap will do it to you in many cases, when Word is very happy to use a .GIF instead. In fact…yes, I just reduced the other day a 2.5 MB document someone sent me via mail down to about 100 kB by replacing a couple of bitmaps with identical .GIFs.
Into MS Word and saved it as Test.doc; the result is a 19,486 byte file. I repoened it and added:
<enter>Here’s another line<enter>
and saved it, now it is 29,184 bytes - that’s without any special formatting and change of fonts.
29,184 bytes to save 36 characters of text; that’s some pretty serious overhead.
I saved the same document as Rich Text Format for a file size of 2,511 bytes; still quite large, considering the contents, but smaller than MS Word by a factor of ten.
That’s fine, but even if all the text were saved at the same ratio as Mangetout’s example, which is of course extreme, that’s 160,000 words on a CD. I’m not sure what the OP’s idea of a lot is, but I got the impression that it was less than this. And Jim B. hasn’t even said that he has any imbedded images.
Agreed Achernar. I’m a big Madonna fan and have a Word doc with the lyrics to every single song she’s EVER sung - including B-sides, duets, SNL skits, Broadway shows - you name it. The “master copy” of the document contains text only and is 423kb. By my math, he should be able to put 1504 copies of the doc on a standard 650MB CD-ROM (or 1654 on a 700MB one). That’s a lot of words.
In MSWORD 97 I have a document with 53,000 words, 88 pages, and it takes 334 Kbytes so you could get about 2,000 documents like this in a CDrom (over 100 million words).
[quote}I’m going to have nightmares for weeks![/quote]
Well, thankfully I didn’t transcribe them myself. I was looking for the words to one particular song and came across a site that had them all. I have an app that will leech a site with 2 clicks, so I did that, then wrote a short macro to cut and paste all of the pages into Word. It cost me all of 20 minutes or so.
Are you using packet-writing software like DirectCD to burn the CDs? I have never used such programs, but I think they can waste hundreds of megs of space.
