Huge RTF files after conversion

[TheMadBrewer]

I was playing around with ABC Amber Palm Converter and Stingo's Word Macro.

I transfered a couple of books to the reader and I thought it was taking a long time. When I checked the size. they were 18 MB!

500KB .pdb -> 1mb .rtf (with Amber) -> 18MB .rtf (after macro)

I've heard of Word Bloat but that is ridiculous.

I suspect it is a word problem, because if I open the file with WordPad and then do a "save as" it becomes a 875KB .rtf

If I save it in Word as a Word Document it comes to 2.5MB. If I open it as a word document and save it as .rtf it goes back to 18MB

I've looked at the raw .rtf (I've done some work with generating rtf documents before so I am a little familiar with the format) and it looks like it is applying the font and formating to each individual word in the document!

This is on a Win2K box with Word 2003 (don't have the reader hooked up to this, this is just my main desktop)

Just thought I'd pass this along.

I'd also like to thank all the folks here (and Sony should as well, because I would not have bought my reader without this site) for all the advice.

[HarryT]

Does the file contain pictures? Pictures are stored in an extremely "verbose" manner in RTF files - an image which is, say, 100kb as a JPG of GIF file can add many MB to the size of an RTF file.

[TheMadBrewer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Does the file contain pictures? Pictures are stored in an extremely "verbose" manner in RTF files - an image which is, say, 100kb as a JPG of GIF file can add many MB to the size of an RTF file.

Nope, no pictures, just text. It is strange, because if I open the 18MB file using WordPad (not Word) and then hit file, it is saved at a normal size.

As I said, from looking at the raw file, it appears that word is applying the formating (typeface, font, size, etc.) to each individual word of the file separately. I have no idea why it is doing this.

I did some more playing and the huge RTF files could not be read on the reader. They transfered and show in the book list but when I try and open one I get an error.

I am happy with my WordPad workaround and I don't mean this thread as any complaint. I am sure there is something funny with my Word configuration. But I wanted to make a record so that if anybody else had this problem, they to would have a work around.