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Subject: Re: [office] word-count (was Re: [office] Data Grid Size element proposal)
"Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca> wrote on 11/24/2008 05:59:28 PM: > > > But why is this information saved in the file? The reason is probably lost in the mists of time. This information has always been stored in documents going back to precursor binary formats since the late 1980's. It may come from common librarial practice, where records of hard-copy resources would include the size of the book (in inches and in pages) as well as title, author, subject, etc. My guess is they added word-count to electronic documents as an analogue to that practice. Remember in those days as well, the document format itself might be proprietary and undocumented, but in Windows at least it was common to store the metatadata as OLE Properties, which could be quickly retrieved without understanding the underlying document format. So that would be useful for search engines, document servers, etc., and any other programs that operated on the document metadata. But that is all in the past. The same constraints don't necessarily exist today. In particular, with a standard document format, the entire contents of the document is open for reading/scanning, not just the metadata. On the other hand, I don't see any reason to remove these features from ODF, since there may be applications that use them. -Rob
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