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Why are pages files so large?
- Thread starter jwolf6589
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Even .docx files are larger than the older.doc files. But honestly why are word processing files so large these days? Remember Claris Works back in 1994? Remember how large those word processing files were? Fitting on a floppy disk and all.
LOL. I remember when an entire operating system fit on a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy. You're dating yourself John.
LOL. I remember when an entire operating system fit on a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy. You're dating yourself John.
I remember when it all fit on a 5.25" floppy. I fact, I remember when it didn't exist and I worked with paper/tape loaded mainframes bigger than my house with less power than an iPhone 3G.
I remember when there wasn't even paper, just a piece of slate. All I had for writing was a piece of chalk. I had to sharpen that on a rock. Life sure was hard, way back in the 80s.
(hmm... What? )
(hmm... What?
)
If you make a copy of that .pages file and rename the extension to .zip, you can open it and see what is taking up the space. I suspect that 40KB or more are the preview .jpg files.
You're dating yourself John.
I've dated myself lots of times. Especially after my kids were born.
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I remember when there wasn't even paper, just a piece of slate. All I had for writing was a piece of chalk. I had to sharpen that on a rock.
(hmm... What?
I remember when the Ancient Aliens landed and taught me about slate, chalk & rock. And files were newfangled hand tools, not word documents.
I still have a Risc OS machine. I just tried writing a few lines of text and then looked at the resulting file in a plain-text editor. There are a few bytes of control codes:
But the rest of it is just plain text, presented as-is. Total size: 239 bytes.
Obviously adding more fonts, bold, underline etc will increase the size, but not by much! And until you start embedding images and other "fancy" things there's nothing that will bloat the file. It does make you wonder what the modern word processing tools are doing...
I totally agree with you! It is not a matter of writing with real paper or using bludgeons like someone is sarcastically saying.
It is deliberate waste of valuable disk storage to encourage customers to buy more and more demanding hardware which fosters more and more demanding software which fosters more and more demanding hardware... and so on, ad infinitum.
I've created a text only Pages document and opened it with the .zip trick.
Well, of an overall size of 740 KiB there is a Preview Jpeg 110KiB large, along with 6 PresetImageFillsXXX.jpg, each weighing roughly 90KiB, so that of 740 KiB, 650 KiB are wasted for (useless?) JPG.
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Pages incorporates version control.
File > Revert To...
I do not believe Word has version control. I could easily be wrong, I have not used Word in over 10 years.
No version control in Word. As a matter of fact, if you accidentally delete a Word document and you haven't selected "Always create a backup" from Word preferences, your chance of recovering the document are slim.
At work I was recently asked to deploy a new document template to all staff. The size? 40 MB. It has some nice photos in it, but a 40 MB template = 40+ MB documents.
I used the "zip trick" and found that it contained super-high-quality photos, which I was able to compress to JPEG with practically-unnoticable quality loss, getting the template down to less than 10% of its original size. I'm glad I took the effort!
I used the "zip trick" and found that it contained super-high-quality photos, which I was able to compress to JPEG with practically-unnoticable quality loss, getting the template down to less than 10% of its original size. I'm glad I took the effort!