Joined: Dec 06, 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Toledo, Ohio USA
Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 10:09 pm Post subject: Why NeoOffice MS Word 97 doc File Size Smaller than OOo ?
Can anyone here explain to me why text documents saved as MS Word 97 are so much smaller from NeoOffice (2.2.2p3) than when saved from OpenOffice (2.3.x) from either FreeBSD or Solaris systems ?
A relatively simple 3-page OOo text document when saved as an MS Word 97 .doc file from OpenOffice running on either my FreeBSD or Solaris systems approaches 140 Kbytes, while the *same* OOo/NO text document saved as an MS Word 97 .doc file from NeoOffice (MacOS X 10.4.11) is around 44 Kbytes !
How can I get my OpenOffice installations to generate such compact Word 97 documents as NeoOffice makes ?
Personally, I *only* use OpenOffice or NeoOffice to create simple MS Word 97 text documents that need to get attached to e-mail messages (as required by the receipients), and I'd much prefer to send smaller rather than *much* larger attachments whenever possible.
Since NeoOffice uses the OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 file import and export code, the most likely causes is that Sun's engineers made a change in OOo 2.3.x. I wouldn't think they would purposely make the file size bigger but I would assume that they made changes to fix a bug. Other than that, I don't have any other theories to offer.
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 7:10 am Post subject:
Patrick is correct. Word 97 documents created with NeoOffice 2.2.1 and OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 are the same size, whereas (Word 97) documents created with OOo 2.3.0 are much larger.
I didn't have access to the Solaris system yet today,
but I know from past experience that files similar to this
particular ODT when saved from either StarOffice8
or OpenOffice-2.3.1 (Sparc Solaris 10) are 100,000+ bytes.
OK, so we're only talking about an extra 66 Kbytes or so of overhead here.
When, however, the size of the DOC file matters
(one site to which I need to submit DOC files on occasion
limits submitted DOC files to 150 Kbytes, which forces me
to edit more of the content of the document than I might
otherwise).
I like the idea that the NeoOffice binary can translate ODT documents
to DOC files from the shell using appropriate macros,
but this approach won't help me when I'm not logged into the console.
In each case, these documents were saved as MS Word 97/2000/XP
documents on three platforms to which I have direct access (Solaris
10/Sparc, FreeBSD 6.2-R/i386, and Darwin 10.4.11/ppc) with OpenOffice,
StarOffice, and NeoOffice hosted on their respective platforms, as follows:
Code:
=================================================================
Save As MS Word 97 File Size (bytes)
OS/Platform/Application Version 00 Version 01 Version 02
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Solaris 10/Sparc
OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 104,448 104,448 107,520
StarOffice 8 Prod. Update 8 104,448 104,448 107,520
-----------------------------------------------------------------
FreeBSD 6.2-R/i386
OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 80,384 80,384 83,456
OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 80,384 80,384 83,456
OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 80,384 80,384 83,456
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Darwin 10.4.11/ppc
NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 3 8,704 8,704 11,776
-----------------------------------------------------------------
My question to this list is, essentially, how/why does NeoOffice
manage to write such efficient MS Word 97 document files compared
to OpenOffice running on either Solaris or FreeBSD ?
I did notice while conducting this informal test that NeoOffice did not
render the Version 02 document exactly the same as the other two
platforms (i.e., an extra line of text was rendered by NeoOffice).
It looks like your .odt from NeoOffice has no Thumbnails entries in it. I would suspect that if you do an "unzip -l" on the Solaris and FreeBSD .odt files, the big file in the .odt is Thumbnails/thumbnail.png.
I am not sure why your NeoOffice .odt files are missing this entry, but I do know that on Mac OS X, both NeoOffice and OpenOffice generate Thumbnails/thumbnail.png files that are only are 10K unzipped.
Joined: Dec 06, 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Toledo, Ohio USA
Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 11:20 am Post subject:
Thanks for looking at this.
The .odt files posted in the previous message were generated by OpenOffice running on a Solaris 10 system and had the thumbnail stripped from the archive prior to posting.
The file sizes reported previously are for the MS Word 97 .doc files that come
from these .odt files.
While I'm certainly curious as to why the .doc files sizes differ between Solaris
and FreeBSD, I'm really more interested in understanding why the
NeoOffice .doc files are so much smaller than the others.
Can another curious forum reader note the .doc file sizes that come from
OpenOffice running on Win32 and Linux systems ?
You mention that PNG thumbnails are generated by NeoOffice (and, of course,
OpenOffice).
My recent experience, however, is that NeoOffice generates (quite large) PDF
thumbnails (which I prefer to strip out of the archive before I transport the
NeoOffice-generated .odt file to another platform) -- the PNG thumbnails are
much smaller, in comparison, but that is the topic for another thread.
The .odt files posted in the previous message were generated by OpenOffice running on a Solaris 10 system and had the thumbnail stripped from the archive prior to posting.
Never mind. I was working too late when I wrote my post. The thumbnail only affects the .odt file size and no thumbnail is put in a .doc file AFAIK.
To finally answer your question, the difference is caused by changes to the Word import/export code made by Novell's engineers in the ooo-build project.
While I don't understand how their changes work, a quick grok of the ooo-build patches that NeoOffice checks out from ooo-build's svn repository shows that a few patches are applied to OOo's sw/source/filter/ww8 directory. This is the directory where OOo' Word import/export code resides.
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