Thunderous Cacophony said:
I had no idea that PDFs were so heinous to work with. Related question: Is there a format that researchers, copyeditors, etc. use when they need to handle large documents? I've written a bit in the past and I've noticed that Word starts acting up once you pass a certain threshold, plus it's a pain if you have any images in the document.
Yep, they use PDF.
Or, rather, LaTeX, which they then compile into a PDF. Academics do use it a lot, especially in the science fields. In theory, it's not that bad, you do something like
\paragraph{My paragraph text goes here}
and then compile it and you get a paragraph of your text. If that paragraph then obeys the text flow rules you can set up - say, you may want two (or three) columns per page, you can set each line to end in a whole word, or you can allow word breaking, you can specify how the text would flow around images (for example, it may not, or you can always have it on the left side), you can even start each paragraph in a fancy way (say, a giant calligraphed) first letter, or just slightly indented).
You can also add other markup that would decorate all your pages, say, with a border, or a header, or a footer (or any combination thereof).
You can specify other things that aren't paragraphs, like citation blocks or any other thing you can think of (citation references, example sections, tooltip boxes, info segments, just to name a few possibilities). You can make up markup, too for anything custom you want.
You can not only do text control and styling, the LaTeX processing can give you dynamic[footnote]-ish - it's done once per compilation[/footnote] content, such as table of content (same as with a Word document - just takes headings and stuff) or image insertion (you mark them up with just a reference, the engine then inserts them into the document) or even references. That one is quite cool - you just have a completely separate file with references - in there you describe the sources (Authors, publishing year, ISBN, yadda yadda, plus a simple name) and just reference the simple name - the LaTeX processor then inserts the correct format of the reference in the text and all of the references after the document also in the format you want if you want a reference to be a "[1]" and then at the bottom to have "[1] , ", that's what you get, if you want to then change all references everywhere in the document to be "[]" and at the end have "[] <Name of book/source>, , , , , " you just need to recompile with that option as opposed to changing everything.
And there is more. It's not entirely dissimilar to HTML or forum markup, but it's quite more powerful. Also, it's not
the same mind you, but has the same idea and somewhat similar execution - it's, after all, a markup language.
As I said in the beginning, though, that's in theory. In practice, you might find some parts of LaTeX to be a black art. It's not
that bad, for the most part, as you can just use (or create, if you wish) a template and stick to that, but sometimes if you want to do something fancy without fully understanding how it may require a goat sacrifice and/or black candles and chants.
Still, it's better for editing large documents since, as you've seen, Word tends to choke up on them badly. Heck, it's better today - in the past some arbitrary, but still strict, limit was in place (say, 37 pages - consistent but weird and not generally advertised) beyond which Word would completely crap out - corruption of the document would not be uncommon, often with
bizarre effects, say, you may be able to save, but never open or similar. Nowadays it tends to be a tad more graceful when it starts dying in agony due to having too much content. Also tends to handle it better, if I recall correct, in that it doesn't really
die it just stays in the process of dying in (slightly less) agony.
I do recommend giving it a look, I just want to warn you it's not as user friendly as Word and may have a learning curve.
