Word and its limits
It is only a excellent software for ease of use and intuitiveness, the software is limited when the need increases ...
The other day I was at the library studying "cheerfully" when she got a friend of mine with his laptop and his thesis. Doc with a lot of images that made the document of 148 pages weighing about 550MB. The university claimed that the student would provide a hard copy and an electronic copy CdRom to be delivered in the secretariat of the institute. The thesis file CdRom had to be in one of the following formats:
- RTF (Rich Text Format)
- PDF (Portable Document Format)
Armed with good patience we have first tried a conversion to RTF conversion times as infuriating and painful as a result: the file would not open almost never, when everything was opened with a random formatting, purely coincidental!
So we have decided to use PDF.
We open this mammoth 550MB file in Word, and when the application crashes, it loses formatting, numbers footer lose the bill, the captions of images moving left and right for no reason ... a nightmare.
I decide to take the version of the thesis "broken down", ie the individual file.doc that create the whole thesis ...
- Inizio.doc
- Introduzione.doc
- The Capitolo.doc
- ...
I open them one by one on my Mac and reliable because at least we can work with a computer that does not crash every 13-15 minutes. File by file re-check and re-settle errors and formatting dates in the case, including wrong numbers and notes lacking in logic (because Word)!
And every file.doc modified gave a nice APPLE + P and I created the equivalent pdf file. The biggest problem was in Chapter IV in which There were about 80 pictures (high resolution) and the problems have required about 40 minutes of corrections given the slowness of showing things in the Word, and strict stupidity in not understanding what / how to correct.
But after a troubled birth of 2 hours I created all the pdf file of the case! Now do was to unite all those blessed. Pdf and thanks to Automator and to my "little program" that I had wisely created some time ago there was no problem: click to launch the application and select the file, 3 minutes to join all the files and the perfect result.
A perfect pdf file of about 120MB which can not be faulted on any computer that does its job and does not have a slightest smear formatting!
Put it all on CdRom with one click and my friend was all happy and smiling and the next day you are presented with the CdRom on the answering machine.
What have I learned? Never use Word to do elaborate longer than 5-10 pages. Especially a thesis ... used strictly Latex .
