Us lean geeks seem to find waste at every turn and in every crevice, but this was a new one for me. A couple days ago I told you about faux precision, and one snippet of text that I copied and pasted from an e-dictionary in Microsoft Word format was:
ver-i-si-mil-i-tude [ver-uh-si-mil-i-tood] - something, as an assertion, having merely the appearance of truth.
Seems simple enough, right? A few bits and bytes, probably taking up the space of spec of dust on a typical hard drive. If that.
Well, not exactly. When the formatting blew up, I took a look at the underlying code, and this is what Microsoft Word uses to describe those few letters:
<P class=MsoNormal><font face=Arial color=black size=3><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">ver</span></font><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'">⋅</span></font><font face=Arial color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">i</span></font><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'">⋅</span></font><font face=Arial color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">si</span></font><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'">⋅</span></font><font face=Arial color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">mil</span></font><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'">⋅</span></font><font face=Arial color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">i</span></font><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'">⋅</span></font><font face=Arial color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">tude</span></font><font face="Arial Unicode MS" color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial Unicode MS'"> </span></font><font face=Arial color=black><span style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">[ver-uh-si-mil-i-tood]<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p></span></font></P>And now you know why you need larger and larger electronic storage...