SoftMaker.com

Hi everyone,

I was just saving a text document (12pt TNR, single spacing, no tricks) into 3 formats: .tmd, .docx, and .doc.

The way I have my PC set up, is that I have MS Office 2003 installed for full compatibility with my collection of older .doc files made by me, which I originally saved using MSO 2003. In addition, I have SMO 2010 rev.591 installed, and also MS Office 2010. Kind of complex, I know, but each suite has its strong points, and if nothing else full compatibility with its native formats.

Anyway, I noticed when I saved my 286 kb original .doc file from Word 2010 (as a .docx), it became only 72 kb in size. I then opened the same .doc in TextMaker and saved it as a .tmd file, and it became 188 kb in size.

For some reason, I was under the impression the .tmd format was XML based (like .docx), but I can't find any information about this. But I could not open the .tmd file with 7-zip (like you can do with .docx files), so this made me doubt that. So I would like to read up and the properties of the .tmd format. Is there an information file somewhere that I can read?

Also, I wonder why the .tmd format saves the document to a 188 kb size? It is 100 kb smaller than .doc, but it is more than 100 kb bigger than the .docx. Why is this? Does it include the font, or?

Thank you,

Patrick

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

.tmd is a quite compact binary format (that's why it is smaller than .doc), but it is not XML-based at all. XML formats like DOCX and OpenDocument are ZIP-compressed which gives additional savings, that's why they are even smaller.

You could zip your .tmd file and it will probably be about the size of .docx.

_________________
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Thanks for the information, Martin.

Interesting:

- when I 7-zip the .tmd file, it becomes only 44kb
- when I 7-zip the .docx file (which is of course already compressed), it stays about the same (around 70kb)
- .doc compressed becomes 51kb.

So .tmd files can be compressed the most in size out of .doc, .docx, and .tmd. That may be useful to know if archiving many documents.

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User