I read a few items on the web all which claimed that a large plain text file would increase in size by well over 1000% when converted to a format used by one of the common word processors. This seemed wrong to me, so I decided to test the claim with a little experiment.

I have a plain text file, let's call it X.txt, that is over 2.2 MB in size. I've been using and adding things to X.txt for at least 10 years. It now has 33810 lines, 293,082 words, and 2,251,880 characters. I think X.txt is a good file to use in an experiment.

I opened X.txt in LibreOffice and then saved that as an ODT file. The result was the file X.odt which consisted of 757 pages of text. ODT files are actually compressed ZIP archives, but I wanted to know the size before compression. I used Emacs to look inside the X.odt ZIP archive and observed that the actual size of X.odt was over 4.5 MB. So the size of X.odt was over 104% larger than the size of X.txt instead of being over 1000% larger. But a file in a word processing format being over double the size of the file in plain text format is still a large difference.

This experiment is far from definitive of course, but it is automatic that file size increases significantly when converting from plain text to some format used by word processors. A significant decrease in file size is also automatic when taking the reverse direction. The question now is whether or not these facts are all that important. I don't think they are given that there are many ways of working around file size problems. Other criteria should be used when making the choice between using plain text or using a word processor.

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