[comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc] Bug in MS Word 4.0 re long documents ?

zeno@euler.uchicago.edu (L. Richard Duffy) (01/16/91)

Has anyone out there had a peculiar problem with Microsoft
Word 4.0 (for PCs) like this?  Two different documents
I have, each longer than 250 Kbytes, seem to lose some
of their character formats upon being saved.  Apparently
the only such losses are underlines and hidden characters
getting changed back to normal.  No actual text gets
lost, of course.  The losses happen at random locations,
mostly in the last third of the file, and seemingly
in "clusters" -- a page or two of consecutive
losses and then a stretch which is okay, etc.

Possibly related is the fact that a division appears to
have a maximum possible length of somewehere around 
250,000 characters (with very modest amounts of special
formatting).  I noticed after paginating a 400-Kbyte
document that it has an "invisible" division break at
about 250,000 bytes -- the only way to see it is to watch
the "D1" versus "D2" at the bottom.  Indeed, doing a
format division of any kind, without highlighting the
whole thing, only takes effect in the division containing
the cursor, even though I had placed no extra division
breaks explicitly.  This whole phenomenon might be
independent of the above-mentioned character format
problem.

Any information about either or both issues would
be greatly appreciated.

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