[H-GEN] Document Formatting

[Wayne Sierke]

On Fri, 2012-03-30 at 10:57 +1000, Julian DeMarchi wrote:
> The said document is a book my Mother is wirtting on family history.
> What software for Windows could I look at for her if anything? 

Scrivener is well worth a look:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

It was originally developed for Mac but has now also been released for
Windows and a beta version is currently available for Linux.

> She's
> just a general home user, who did not even know the size of the document
> _was_ 500MB, and still struggles to understand why it _is_ bad..

A couple of things to check:-

        Whether inserted images which are being scaled down have been
        retained at their original resolution - which might not be such
        a bad thing for a master document but might not be considered
        necessary in this case. Another approach could be to use
        temporary placeholder images e.g. gif/png, with perhaps just a
        border and a descriptive line or two of text on a solid
        backround.
        
        Whether the change tracking feature is enabled. Presuming that
        this can be turned off and the change history purged - after
        making a secure backup copy of the document.
        
        If it's a recent enough version I think MS Word might now have a
        "master" document feature which allows the document to be split
        into parts which can be edited separately.

-- 
HTH,

Wayne