Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

Hi,

You'd probably be better looking in the WPS+ conference for this 
(FREE::WPS-PLUS).

I seem to remember finding this problem before at a customer site. The 
response was something along the lines that WPS+ puts the cursor movements 
(up, down, page etc.) into the document as you go along. A gold-write gets 
rid of these control characters - thus the document size is decreased.

Cheers,

Andy

When ALL-IN-1 does a:

    MCD (Make copy of document), which always implies creating an output
    document of the same type, or

    CD (Convert document) when the input and output types are the same


it does a block mode copy because that is much quicker than a record mode
copy.  

It is possible, but I don't know for certain, that doing a record mode copy
which forces the files to be read and written using the WPS-PLUS text
dataset.  The API command to do this is: 

    copy 'IN.WPL' 'OUT.WPL' TXT$DSAB_WPSPLUS TXT$DSAB_WPSPLUS


Ask in the WPS-PLUS conference, or ask your customer to try this.  If it 
does reduce the size of the file let me know and I'll tell you how to 
create some entries in the FORMAT and DOCUMENT CONVERSIONS master files to 
provide this operation at the user interface.


Richard

    WPS-PLUS edits in-place, i.e. it makes changes inside the file without
    creating a new version. This tends to have the effect of making the file
    a bit inefficient after it has been edited several times. It's the same
    effect as happens to an RMS file after it has been randomly updated.
    
    When you make a copy with MCD, GOLD/W etc., only the nicely formated
    text is written out, and so the file becomes smaller. There isn't an
    equivalent of $CONVERT/FDL for WPS-PLUS documents, the only way to do
    it is to make a copy as you discovered.
    
    Graham
    
    PS I don't know what you used to type your note, but it was full of
    miscellaneous '
' characters.

    I'm no great WPS-PLUS expert, but . . .
    
    WPS-PLUS edits documents "in place", that is it doesn't create a new
    version of a document's file when you edit it (unlike "traditional"
    editors like TPU, EVE, etc).
    
    Because of this, a document which has been editted lots of times gets
    fragmented - all the old stuff is still in there, with pointers around
    it and a fairly comlicated structure.  So the file size (in blocks)
    includes all this "old stuff" as well as the current stuff.
    
    When you use WPS-PLUS to "copy" the document (by using WPS-PLUS' Gold-W
    or Gold-G, or by mailing the document off-node by the way), WPS-PLUS
    will compress all this "garbage" out of the file, resulting in a smaller
    block size.
    
    Copy ( or convert WPS-PLUS -> WPS-PLUS) just does an RMS copy of the
    file. RMS doesn't understand the WPS-PLUS "internals" of the file, so
    doesn't touch it. So the size doesn't change.
    
    The only way to get a document's file to "shrink" is to use WPS-PLUS to
    do it (as you found), because only WPS-PLUS knows what's "garbage" and
    what isn't. So Gold-W, or Create a new document and Gold-G the old one,
    will do it.
    
    I suppose you could write a UDP to do it.
    
    Dave.