Hi, after compiling one section of my manuscript into docx - just text, double spaced, Times font it - the file size is 20KB. It’s 4,500 words and 15 pages. I need to reduce it to 16KB max for a competition. I’ve tried saving it Pages and converting to Word but that was even bigger. Tried downloading it again from Google docs which got it to 19KB. Any suggestions? Thanks
If it’s just text, there isn’t going to be much you can do.
4500 words x 5 characters per word is 22,500 characters. (You can get either Word or Scrivener to give you an exact character count.) Plain text (if the competition allows it) will have a little less overhead, but you need a 20% cut. The only way to do that is going to be to reduce the number of words.
3 Likes
Technically, using shorter words is also an option.
1 Like
There isn’t much you can do about that other than cut the word count, as noted. DOCX is already one of the most efficient rich text formats, in terms of file size, because it is in fact a .zip file with a different file extension. If you were to compile to plain text it would probably be a lot larger unless you compressed it (and then it would be much smaller as .docx has piles upon piles of extra raw text to describe formatting that plain-text will not). And there are much better compression algorithms out there than .zip, aside.
That’s a very strange competition limit though, given all of the above. If you can cut your submission by using better compression tools and different file formats. 
Perhaps the ones who designed it were not terribly technical.
And when it comes to compression, using the same words over and over. Really, the whole thing is crazy. I could “write”[1] a 100,000 word submission that, as a .txt file at 4.5mb, but as a .zip file is 10kb. Well below the competition limit.
By that I mean, exponentially populate data with copy and paste on 10x sized chunks. ↩︎
2 Likes
Yup. It’s really such an odd combination, docx and 16 KB.
I compiled a 4,500 words test document without any formatting or styles (about 24 KB). Comes out at roughly 17 KB, which sounds okay-ish. (Until you look inside.) Unpacked it’s 101 KB, and the actual text blown up to 79 KB. Most of it being crap. And the same crap over and over and over and over and… 
(e.g. setting the same font 411 times, in a document with only one font!)
1 Like
Thank you for your effort, much appreciated. I can’t reduce word count, just thought it may be a Scrivener compiling issue but obviously not.
1 Like
Well, to a degree it can be thought of as a Scrivener thing, in as much as the amount of formatting used to describe the appearance of the text can make a difference. Every tool is going to be doing things slightly different from one another, as this is one of those things that has no one right way to do it. You saw that with Docs, and how it was slightly smaller. LibreOffice is another free word processor you could try saving from.
How you format the text could make a big difference too. Using styles instead of raw formatting might save space, because then each paragraph only has to declare itself as using a particular style, rather than having all of the formatting codes repeated over and over in each paragraph (although as noted above, repetition is very efficiently compressed).
2 Likes
In this competition, is the specified limit 16KB or 16K? Any chance they were using a bit of now-common lingo (16K) to specify a word limit (16,000)?
3 Likes
Thanks everyone. Their mistake, it’s 16MB! Appreciate the help though.
2 Likes