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Yes, it is. This is a quite typical size of a book. Typically novels have about 100 thousand words, but four times that size is not at all uncommon.
by enriquto 7y ago
Yes, it is. This is a quite typical size of a book. Typically novels have about 100 thousand words, but four times that size is not at all uncommon.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoBooks should not be written in a single text file, though. That is asking for trouble.
- enriquto 7y agoWhy not? Beacuse of bad text editors? Or is there some fundamental reason about that?
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoBecause it is extremely hard to work with it? Same reason why we do not put programs in a single source file.
- omaranto 7y agoWhy is it extremely hard to work with the whole novel in a single file? Because most software for writing prose is not up to the task?
- omaranto 7y agoA good editor can handle them without any trouble. I just downloaded Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg and opened it in Emacs. It opened instantly, I could immediately go the end (line 22333), scroll around, count the words (there are around 222617), count the ocurrences of the word 'whether' (there are 91, the last of which is on line 21769), make a change somewhere in the middle. All of this is instant. You can do all that instantly in Vim too (... and I just checked to make sure). A megabyte of text is just not a lot of text for a good editor.
- weeksie 7y agoThat's untrue. Novels are usually in the 90-110k range, depending on genre. If you're an established author, especially in fantasy or sci fi, insane doorstoppers like that do occur, but 400k is an outlier even for sff.
- enriquto 7y agoHere you have a list of very famous books with their word counts. Quite a few of them have more than half a million words. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that a text editor is able to handle that size. After all this is a tiny amount of data compared to what has to deal a program that does image or video processing, so there's 0 reason for a text editor to be "laggy" when dealing with just a few megabytes. https://blog.fostergrant.co.uk/2017/08/03/word-counts-popular-books-world/ https://blog.fostergrant.co.uk/2017/08/03/word-counts-popula...
- weeksie 7y agoThat doesn't exactly make your point.
- weeksie 7y agoSeriously, that’s stupid. You’re collecting outliers. Unpublished writers trying to hawk 400k word novels are for the most part delusional. Every single piece in your list that goes into that territory is something written by an established author. Though, to be fair, an author organizing a work of that size in a single markdown document has bigger problems than key lag.
- t0astbread 7y agoIn the context of a book, yes. But I mean in the context of an online Markdown editor. (Or even a Markdown editor at all. Can you actually write books in Markdown?)
- enriquto 7y ago> Can you actually write books in Markdown? Yes, you can. The "Programming Perl" book by Larry Wall was famously written entirely in "POD" format, which is just like markdown. I don't know if it was split into several files.
- ggambetta 7y agoI wrote the novel I'm referring to, and a Computer Graphics textbook (with images and equations and stuff).
- type0 7y agoRust book is written in Md https://github.com/rust-lang/book https://github.com/rust-lang/book as well as plenty other books that I can't remember from the back of my head.