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Subject:File sizes in different languages? From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Mon, 12 Oct 1998 08:39:18 -0600
Jennifer O Neill wondered <<I have 5 Word95 files, each containing
the same info but in different languages. But 2 of the files are
twice the size as the others. What's happening?>>
There are several possibilities. The first, and by far the most
likely, is that the size difference stems from the fact that
different languages have different efficiencies. French, for example,
is routinely up to 25% longer than English, depending on how flowery
the translator chose to be. Other languages can be easily up to twice
the length of the identical English document. Even a relatively
small 25% difference might be compounded by the way your computer
stores files on its hard disk: on my home computer, the minimum
amount of space used for any file is 26K, whether the file contains
one word or a thousand. (Depending on your hard disk size and how
it's partitioned, the actual value could be lower or higher; I've
been too lazy to partition my disk because I've got tons of space, so
the maximum chunk size is being used.) So what happens to file
sizes? If the translated file is 26K plus one word, it appears
on-disk as 52K. You can test whether this is the case simply by doing
a word count (under the tools menu) and seeing how the English and
translated versions differ.
A second problem might be that the non-English files were produced
using Unicode, which allocates two bytes for each character (rather
than the more traditional one byte used by ASCII) to allow for the
larger character sets of non-English alphabets. (Chinese is an
extreme case, with thousands of characters.) That would automatically
double the file size, even if you simply saved the English file using
Unicode instead of ASCII. Unfortunately, I can't confirm whether
Word95 is Unicode-enabled; I suspect it is, since there are (for
example) Japanese-language versions of Word that would require this,
and if you're working in multiple languages, you've likely got
"Japanese language support" (etc.) installed on your computer
somewhere.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"Microsoft Word: It grows on you... but with a little fungicide,
you'll be feeling much better real soon now!"--GH
