On Wednesday 31 December 2008 06:47:18 am Peter Baumgartner wrote: > Hi, > > I noticed that the menu option "compressed" decreases the file sizes > tremendously. UserGuide for example shrinks down from 700kB to 108kB! > > Is there something to observe using this option? Why does LyX not use the > compressed format as default? > > Peter
Hi Peter, I can give you a pretty good reason -- because LyX files seldom are big enough to be problematic. For instance, the LyX file creating my 90 page book "Troubleshooting: Just the Facts" is 170,111 bytes. There's no earthly reason to waste time and effort compressing a file that size unless you have thousands of them. The LyX file creating my 309 page, 110,000 word "Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist" is 1,106,520 bytes (about a megabyte). While that isn't a small file, in context of today's terabyte drives, it's probably not what you'd want to shrink, especially if you don't have many of them. You'd want to shrink those 400MB videos, or maybe all of those 800 1MB digital photos. But then you could ask "well, what's the downside of shrinking the LyX file?" The downside isn't huge, but it's there. For one thing, shrinking turns it binary and removes a lot of redundancy, meaning one bad byte could totally wreck the file. One bad byte on a regular LyX file would be either a misspelled word or an easily troubleshot bad command/environment. The other thing is, a lot of us (or at least me and another guy :-) regularly tweak LyX files with text editors (Vim) or scripts (Perl/Python/Ruby), and if it were compressed we'd need to add uncompress and compress to the beginning and end of our scripts, respectively. It wouldn't kill me either way, but I'd definitely vote for having uncompressed be the default. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
