[2004] Is this correct...?

[Sarah Balfour]

I have a friend who's just started (thanks to me giving him my old scanner)
OCR'ing. He had a file (RTFD format) which was roughly 450K. He opened it in
Word *did nothing but change the page size from Letter to A4* and resaved.
Now, I don't know what format it was resaved as, but I would presume Word (as
I don't believe Word, not that I've really looked) can resave in RTFD.

Anyway, the upshot was that the file size leapt from 450K to roughly 10MB!
He emailed me and asked me how this was possible. Now, I know exactly nothing
about Mac Word, but I did come up with a theory. Could someone please confirm
or deny it...?

When he told me that it contained graphics (it was a page from New Scientist)
the only thing I could think of was that Mac Word (maybe Windoze Word does
this too, I've never really tried it and I don't have any OCR software on my
PC now...) suffers from the same issue that plagued Publisher 2000;
insomuchas it cannot store graphics in compressed format, it has to
decompress them before saving, hence the huge increase in size.

Would I be correct in this assumption? If not, could anyone offer me another
explanation as to why the size increased roughly 22 times? I will reiterate,
he didn't do anything other than change the page size.

Cheers

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Sarah:

Yep: I would say you're pretty close to the mark there. Word *can* re-save
as RTFD (it's just a different extension for RTF).

Chances are the document contain a full-page raster graphic (probably a
1-bit TIFF). Word may have re-saved that as a 24-bit graphic, exactly 20
times the size

Had the graphic been in GIF or PNG, Word would have resaved it in compressed
format. If it was in anything else, it couldn't.

Mac and Windows Word are basically the same thing: Mac Word is missing a few
minor functions, but the ones it does have function exactly the same.

Cheers

I have a friend who's just started (thanks to me giving him my old scanner)
OCR'ing. He had a file (RTFD format) which was roughly 450K. He opened it in
Word *did nothing but change the page size from Letter to A4* and resaved.
Now, I don't know what format it was resaved as, but I would presume Word (as
I don't believe Word, not that I've really looked) can resave in RTFD.

Anyway, the upshot was that the file size leapt from 450K to roughly 10MB!
He emailed me and asked me how this was possible. Now, I know exactly nothing
about Mac Word, but I did come up with a theory. Could someone please confirm
or deny it...?

When he told me that it contained graphics (it was a page from New Scientist)
the only thing I could think of was that Mac Word (maybe Windoze Word does
this too, I've never really tried it and I don't have any OCR software on my
PC now...) suffers from the same issue that plagued Publisher 2000;
insomuchas it cannot store graphics in compressed format, it has to
decompress them before saving, hence the huge increase in size.

Would I be correct in this assumption? If not, could anyone offer me another
explanation as to why the size increased roughly 22 times? I will reiterate,
he didn't do anything other than change the page size.

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Yep: I would say you're pretty close to the mark there. Word *can* re-save
as RTFD (it's just a different extension for RTF).

Not so. In Apple's TextEdit, when you save an .rtf document that contains
graphics, it gets saved as .rtfd "RTF with attachments". If you right-click
on one of these .rtfd "files", you'll discover that it's actually a
"package" - a folder with an icon pretending it's a file. Select "Show
Package Contents" and you'll see inside the folder: it contains the basic
..rtf file (named "TXT.rtf") for the formatted text, and as many .tiff, .png,
..pdf and whatever other graphics files you inserted or pasted in, a;; called
"Picture 1.tiff", "Picture 2.png", and so on. They retain exactly their
original format. They are not converted somehow to RTF. If you open the
TXT.rtf file in a pure text editor such as BBEdit or TextWrangler, you'll
see the RTF code includes lines specifying where the graphics get inserted,
e.g.:

\f3\fs24 {{\NeXTGraphic Picture 4.pdf \width6920 \height2640
}¨}

Maybe that's what you meant by "it's a different extension for RTF", but
it's only the TXT.rtf file within the package that is RTF: he other files
are all graphics files, and .rtfd extension denotes that the "file" is
actually a package - quite a different thing.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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