Re: AppleWorks and lots of RAM problem

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <Apr.23.14.53.39.1994.15754@er6.rutgers.edu>,
Kid <neiderma@er6.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 
> I have about 2megs of RAM free when booting my GS with System 601 and then
> running AppleWorks v3 or v4.  But when I try to load a 700k text file, I
> get the message "not enough memory to complete this operation."  If
> I try to boot directly into ProDOS-8 and run AppleWorks v3 or v4, I have
> 3.something megs of ram, but AppleWorks still says "not enough memory".

Are you sure it didn't say "This file exceeds the limits of AppleWorks"?

This message means that the file has too many lines.  The AppleWorks
Word Processor can only support 16250 lines (in version 3.0 and 4.0).

I just tried loading a 994k text file into AppleWorks 4.02 (with 2684k
free memory), and it got this message before it ran out of memory (it
had 761k left when the message appeared).

I tried again with a 663k file, and got the same message.

I then created a text file consisting of 15000 lines of a reasonably
long string (57 characters); total file size 865k.  AppleWorks 4 was
able to load this, and I had 779k of memory left (so the file required
1905k to load).  Boy, does AppleWorks run slowly with a file this big,
or what!  On my unaccelerated IIgs, it took just over a minute to
calculate the page breaks (278 pages).

Don't forget that if you're loading a file with lines longer than 59
characters, the default margins will cause the lines to wrap, resulting
in more lines than you might expect.


I would suggest that AppleWorks is not a good program to use with such
a large file.  I believe the IIgs version of WordPerfect can deal with
arbitrarily large files, because it uses disk-based buffering when
necessary.

Some TextEdit-based editors may be able to load the file (though
you'll usually need twice as much memory, because it has to load the
file and then copy it into TextEdit data structures).

I was able to load the file into a TextEdit editor I've written.  It
was also rather slow (e.g. moving the scroll bar to the end of the
document and waiting for it to redraw took about four seconds).

Free memory before loading: 2559k, after: 1524k.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand