Pathway

[Bruce Hooley]

Hi

 

I decided to try version 7.2, so I downloaded and installed that, and I downloaded and installed the latest version of Pathway. Then I tried outputting my dictionary to LibreOffice. First I tried enabling the macros, but LO crashed. I recovered the main.odt file and tried again. Same result. So I recovered again and tried with the macros disabled. I was able to browse through the file for about 30 seconds, and then it crashed again.

 

When I worked with OpenOffice before, it always crashed on exit, but I was able to work with the file, and any changes I made were saved even though it crashed. But LO seems to crash before I even have time to do anything to the file.

 

With OO I understood it was a problem arising from having a large file. Is it the same problem with LO (the main.odt file came out at about 30Mb. The dictionary is only some 4000 or so entries, but the size comes, I think, from the fact that I have included a number of illustrations). Has anyone else run into this problem? Is there a solution, apart from going back to OO? It is not a serious problem for me at the moment, since we have just published our dictionary, but it would be nice to know I can still produce satisfactory output from later versions.

 

Bruce Hooley

[GregT]

Bruce,

When you bring up the Export Through Pathway dialog, on he Processing
Options tab, there is a check box for Replace styles with direct
formatting in OpenOffice/LibreOffice. This option was added because we
found it tended to avoid crashes for people with very large files.

Another way your message could be read is as a feature request to
reduce the size of the images when formatting the dictionary. I have
found in printing newsletters that if I want to email them, I can get
roughly the same quality by significantly reducing the size of the
images. Currently Pathway may rename the images in the process of
producing the OpenOffice/LibreOffice file (since non-English
characters are not allowed by all processing systems in file names)
but it does nothing to reduce the size of these images.

One interim solution to address this problem is to reduce the size of
the files Flex is working with. To do this you could go to the Linked
Files folder (I think it would be saved under C:\ProgramData\SIL
\Fieldworks 7\Projects\LinkedFiles by default.), create a copy of the
folder so you have the original pictures. Then use a tool like
ImageMagik to process all the pictures and lower their resolution. (Or
process them one at a time if you prefer.) This would put smaller
pictures into the publication production process and therefore make a
smaller odt file.

These are just some ideas you (or others) may find helpful.

[Bruce Hooley]

Hi Greg

Thanks for your suggestions. I tried using Replace Styles with Direct
Formatting, but it didn't make any difference, Libre Office crashed each
time. Not as quickly when I disabled the macros, but it still crashed. I
even tried loading the main.odt file into my old OpenOffice, but that didn't
work either. So I tried filtering for only the 'a' words, and that worked,
so I guess it really is the size of the file. The puzzling thing to me was
that whenever I exported the dictionary and LO opened it, it always came up
with the statement that it had to recover the main.odt file. When that was
done, for the 'a' words, then it loaded and I could work with it. Another
interesting thing I noticed was that when I enabled the macros, all the
right hand guidewords were correct, but if the last entry ran over the
page, the left guide word was the same as the right hand guide word from the
previous page, instead of the first new entry on the left hand page.

And I couldn't find an option to rerun the guidewords macros. When I used to
use OO, there was an option to rerun the macros after one made changes to
the file. If that is still there, I haven't found it yet.

Since, as I mentioned, the dictionary has just been published, I am not
really planning to do it again soon. I was just checking out the latest
versions of the programs. So I haven't tried your other suggestion of
reducing the resolution of the pictures. That might reduce the size of the
file significantly. I'll certainly bear that in mind if I do get to the
point of outputting the dictionary again. I wonder how large a file LO can
really handle comfortably?
Thanks again for your help

Bruce

[Jon C]

When we published our trilingual pocket dictionary via Pathway last
year, I had to switch to .DOC format and edit it in MS Word. Writer
just wasn't able to handle the pagination of a document that large.

Word had some trouble too, but there was definitely something more
than mere file size at work. We only had 3,000 (trilingual but
concise--zero pictures) entries and two reversal indexes, and when we
had done a trial print of that same amount of data by exporting to SFM
and using the MDF Formatter to generate a Word doc, Word had handled
it much, much faster. (I suspected the really long style names and
complex style hierarchy, but shortening and simplifying them didn't
help.)

So, Word is a decent interim workaround until the kinks are all worked
out. (And it can handle guide words without a macro.) But to do this,
you need to export to Writer *without* any guide words, convert
from .ODT to .DOC using Writer, and then add the guide words in Word
by inserting two StyleRef fields in the header (the right one
"searching from bottom of page") and assigning them to the right
styles.

Jon