WTF RTF????

[ffutures]

I just noticed that the RTF version of the character sheet was 1.2 MB, where the DOC version was 117 K and the PDF version was 88 K

So I thought... is this a problem with RTF, or is it something stupid that happened when I saved the file from Word?

So I opened it in Open Office, the only good RTF editor I have, and saved it again. And suddenly it's only 188K. Still the biggest of the three, but something I can cope with.

Not sure what the moral is, except that Word sometimes does some VERY strange things...

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

We get this problem all the time when DOCs are converted to RTF (the format our CAT software uses), especially when they contain tables and graphics. I need to remember the Open Office

[mr-wombat.livejournal.com]

Word, for some mad reason, holds on to a stack of undo information that you can't access. I think it has something to do with sharepoint and community editing as well as all your autosave information - even the autosave is stupid, instead of ... well actually saving the document it saves an entirely new copy invisibly in the same document.
So your rtf document contains pretty much everything you've done to that document since it was created. Open Office doesn't care about all that so usually once you've opened it in OO and saved again, all the information you couldn't use disappears anyway. PDFs don't contain any of that information either, I think its smaller because of the way it remembers the text formatting.

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

It's always been a problem with Word saving RTF files, even before Sharepoint was around. Part of it is to do with the RTF specification itself, and also the way that Microsoft saves a lot of metadata inside the file format. Opening up in Wordpad and resaving it was the old trick.

To be honest, I find the new Word DocX format working out well for me, and I like the new version of Word, even if I don't like the way they've botched autosaving.