TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:RE: Long Documents in Word From:david -dot- locke -at- amd -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sun, 18 Mar 2001 19:08:12 -0600
Microsoft will probably never fix master document. It really isn't broken.
It just can't work the way it was designed. It was designed to have every
document in the master document open simultaneously. Nobody has a machine
with that much RAM, so, of course, it can't open all those files. It
probably runs out of threads before it runs out of RAM.
Back in MS Word 5.0, the heap was large enough. MS Word 5.5 ate up so much
heap that there was very little space for the content of the MS Word
document, so it crashed frequently. There was no solution to that problem.
Word for Windows was brand new code, so the heap problem disappeared.
Without fixing some core issues in MS Word, the master document feature is
architecturally constrained. But, machine eating applications are really
build to push the whole "Bigger-Faster-Better" paradigm that has kept PCs
selling over the last twenty years. Multimedia and the COM/DCOM/Active-X
technologies were designed to hog memory. And, make us go out and buy new
machines. Maybe a MS Word machine will come out built specifically to make
the master document feature work.
Things that have been fixed are bookmarks and numbering. I wouldn't hold my
breath waiting for MS Word to change in any desirable ways. It changes
constantly, so even people that have used it for ages can't get things to
work anymore.
The latest peeve for me is being asked constantly to install features,
actually run a feature that is only available on the MS Office disk like I
have it just laying around, so I can use it everyday!
I've only played with the master document feature long enough to see that it
didn't work and why. Someone might try running it on a four SMP processor
machine and see if it works correctly then. If you try it, let us know how
it turns out.
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
