CPU overload with Word document

[Nelson Moffat]

W2k, Office Pro 2003, Pentium4, 1.9 G

I am scanning some 60 year-old typewritten documents and converting
them to text with OCR (OmniPage Pro 14). Because of the different
fonts of 1950's typewriters and different character spacing and
different numbering systems, the final text, when put into Word files,
contains a great deal of different formatting. I have a dozen files of
about 90 pages each which end up to be about 400 KB in size.

The problem: The latest one I have done, with only about 15 pages of
text turns out to be a huge 35 MEGABYTE file, which when opened uses
100% of my CPU power and most of my 512 of RAM. A slight change, say,
a change of left justification of one line to center justification
almost paralyzes my machine--takes about 5 minutes to complete and
then the whole document will be center-justified!

It seems likely that all the formatting buried in the doc is
responsible. How can I find out what particular formatting is the
culprit, and how can I fix it??

All other programs run fine with a minimal amout of CPU capacity.

Thanks

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It might, in this case, be more effective to just remove the formatting.
Ctrl+A and apply Normal style. Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+Spacebar if necessary to
remove any remaining direct formatting. At this point it might be worthwhile
to select all but the final paragraph mark, copy, and paste into a new
document. Then apply styles and direct formatting as appropriate, guided by
the typed originals.

 

[Graham Mayor]

I was not that enamoured with an earlier version of OmniPage as it made a
dog's breakfast of formatting and it seems that the later version has not
improved the situation much

Probably the simplest plan is to let it convert to plain text and apply your
own formatting.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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