Paragraph Length in Writer
An author attempting to write in stream of consciousness inquired as to the maximum paragraph length in an OOo Writer paragraph. Andrew Brown -- killspam at darwinwars.com -- replied to the question on 12/8/2004: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=79999
Niki Kovacs >contact@kikinovak.net< wrote in news:200412072050.17037.contact@kikinovak.net:
> One thing annoys me, though. I'm currently reworking a novel that has
> a stream-of-consciousness-chapter in it, one long paragraph that
> stretches over about fifteen pages you see like that without any
> punctuation marks or any other interruption it goes on and on for
> about fifteen pages...
>
> Only then, it suddenly stops. There's a limit for paragraphs. After a
> few thousand characters, the cursor just stops and won't go any fu
I know there is a string limit of 64,000 characters; as far as I know, that's the limit for a paragraph, too, and would be very difficult indeed to change. If you have run across a limit before that it would be worrying. But fifteen pages might run to 64,000 characters; and in that case there is nothing we can do. the only suggestion I can make is to write and "invisible" paragraph break style, by putting negative spacing above it equivalent to one normal line break. You would then have to line up the ends of the new and old paragraphs -- I don't know. Might be worth playing with.
Rod Engelsmen -- rodengelsman at ruraltel.net -- elaborated on the issue and provided a work around on 12/8/2004: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=80001
Right. It's a limitation of the C language. A string is actually an array of characters and there's a limit on the size of the array index.
Humongously long paragraphs like that are definitely not the norm. I would suggest just putting a paragraph break at the end of the line every few pages. Adjust the next paragraph manually to have no indent and zero spacing. That would make the paragraph boundary invisible. And if you need to edit it later, you will just have to manually tweak the paragraph boundary.
Or write something less avant-garde :) .
Rod
A further explanation is again provided by Rod on 12/7/2004: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=79974
I remember reading something related to this on this list some time ago. In that case, it had to do with a document that was basically just a long list of words like this:
word
another_word
yet_another
Eventually, you couldn't add any more words.
I think the problem is very basic to the document model of OOo. IIRC, the internal model holds paragraphs in an array somehow, and eventually you can run into the limit of the programming language vis-a-vis the array index (65,536 elements per array, IIRC).
I suspect something of the sort is also working here. Probably each character in a paragraph is held internally as an element in an array -- I suppose along with character formatting info.
Can anyone with more knowledge confirm this?
IF this is the case -- and it's painful to write something like this -- then it's unlikely that OOo is the best tool for the job at hand. A better bet would be to buy a copy of WordPerfect. I believe their internal stream-based model would work better for that kind of doc.
Rod
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Last Edited 24 June 2005