Jeffery said:
I have a two page RTF file that for some reason is over 5 meg. It is a
simple document with some text on the first page and a table on the second.
Would the table make it this big? The DOC version is smaller, but
unfortunately, I need it in RTF format.
On several occasions I have found that OpenOffice creates dramatically
more compact documents than MS Office does. The following test
illustrates this. I created a simple document in OpenOffice (2.0b): 4
lines of text and a 7x14 table with some text in it. Then saved it in
various formats, opened the .doc version in Word (2003) and saved it
again in Word and RTF formats. Results:
_From OOo 2.0b_
OpenOffice 1.0 (sxw): 6,5 KB
OpenDocument (odt): 6,8 KB (this is the default save format for OOo 2.0)
MS Word format (doc): 16 KB
Rich text format (rtf): 29 KB
_From MS Word 2003_
Rich text format (rtf): 32,6 KB (in this case smaller than Word's .doc)
MS Word format (doc): 34,5 KB (this is the default save format for Word)
This (not very scientific) test indicates that you can save around 10%
storage space by using OOo instead of MSOffice for creating RTF. For
general use (default save format on both applications) you can save 80%.
OpenOffice uses compression ("zip-like") on its proprietary formats,
which explains the sxw/odt file sizes, but even on Word files it easily
beats Word on storage economy. I have not inspected the files with
proper tools, so what the extra storage is used for is a mystery to me,
but it is probably useful to some (HDD manufacturers?).
