What lightweight Office (text) programme for large documetents?

I’m trying Libreoffice Writer, but it keeps freezing (Win7 x64, 32GB RAM). I just paste about 400000 lines of text, plain text, no pictures or styles or whatever into a new document, and it chokes. It should end up at around 7000 pages. Now, Notepad handles this fine and fast too, but does not allow me to highlight stuff by adding basic things such as underline or strikethrough. I need to do this very often.

After about 5 attempts I managed to get it in Writer, it took only 34 minutes to go from hitting ctrl-v and actually updating the display.

I’m moving this to Linux soon, so I’d like to know what lightweight (as in memory footprint, fast running, needs only basic text styling options) text programme you could advise.

Abiword is the first thing that comes to mind.

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AbiWord

I am pretty sure that characters per line matters more than lines themselves.

On average how many character do you have in such a file ?

I did some quick tests with 400 000 lines 444 600 character file ( pretty much 1 to 2 chars per line every line )

In my opinion
Okular opened the files the fastest and it was responsive in the first pages but if I go to page 6000 i took about 10 sec to load next page, once loaded it worked like a charm on the page.

Calligra took the second place on opening files and it was good in the first few hundred pages but again if I go to page 6000 it lags and loads every move I make.

Abiword was the last to open the file ( it got stuck on 98% for like 2 min of 4 min total load time ) once loaded scrolling was good and editing was fine again if I don’t just go to page 6000+ then it lags. It takes time to mark text and everything like that.

LibreOffice Writer was at 3rd place in loading the file barely beating Abiword with like 20-30 sec faster load times but at the same time it loaded the file perfectly which means, no matter where you went on the file it was working good.

Next thing I did was to safe the file as .odt and I must say LibreOffice was a bit faster at loading the file but still was at 3rd place.

All of those are opening an existing file. Copy/pasting took too much time to test. ( in every of the mentioned programs).

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Thanks all for the suggestions. I’ll try them all out myself. Yoray, I just checked one of the larger documents (2.2MB). It took 4 minutes just to load it (grey page until text displays). It contains 474.954 words for 10.217.122 characters on 6750 pages.

This is the one that took 34 minutes to paste the ascii text into. But I’ll give LibreOffice Linux a try too, maybe something in Windows is screwing with it.

That’s a lot more that what I tested with :smiley:

So you tried LibreOffice writer in Windows ?

Also I should say pasting into Libreoffice took a lot of time too I terminated the process after 15 min of waiting. I am still recommending to safe it with notepad and then open it with Libreoffice.

R markdown and LaTeX?

In the old days we just used multiple files, for things like books and thesis.

It’s an interesting benchmark to give to developers - how long does it take to paste and paginate half a meg of text.

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