This is a process. However, by eliminating the .plmz, she says we are saving 4 meg off the ‘full’ download. We’re amazed. The whole typescript of the novel is 2 meg. How in heck does .plmz multiply it by 2?
I’m still doing rolling re-write, and have to remind myself to get up and move around before I get a sore back. The intense concentration feels good, however, and I’m ironing out some of the 10,000 little things I generally try to remember as I go.
I know it’s a rhetorical question.
The usual explanation for increases in file sizes when you do conversions,
is that the storage format uses a bigger block size for the chunks.
Really tiny blocks are a lot more storage space efficient, really big
blocks allow you to gain speed by grabbing a big chunk at a time. This is
because all block reads are identical in terms of the overhead for locating
the chunk.
If you want horrendous bloat all you need is an OOP paradigm and a programmer
who thinks Object Oriented Languages are the way to do things by adding
embedded modules. ASCII text files seem quaint until you run out of disk space
or need to do a high speed search for something…GRIN
The progress bar is moving pretty well.
Interesting!
I’m pushing hard. Gathering up all the loose ends.
I don’t know too much about Palm Markup Language in particular, having never needed it myself. However, markup languages in general can be extremely verbose, especially languages like XML that require matching end tags and rigorous attention to whitespace.
The raw files can be absolutely huge. Luckily, these markup languages tend to compress extremely well, too.
Having said that, I’m surprised that pmlz (which I *thought* was a zipped pml file) is double the size of the original. First, I’d make sure you’re compressing the files at the maximum supported compression level. Second, I’d definitely check to make sure any images are scaled down properly for the target device (e.g. an 8″x10″ image at 600 DPI is incredible overkill for any Palm device).
Hope that helps.