I have dumped fifty or sixty documents and 100,000 words into it, opened tens of thousands of words in twenty documents or more, and it shows no signs of strain. I should pimp Ulysses here, as it attempts to address some of these issues, though it's relatively sparse in its feature set. I wonder if Spotlight can be leveraged to provide the.illusion of the long document for practical purposes. I could search and replace terms, change formatting, get information about the documents, such as word counts, or print the documents, all without 'opening' them. The concept of a project, to me, is one in which a few documents are open, or in the foreground, but the rest of the documents, or those in the background, would be accessible for editing through automated means. I agree that a user is only going to work on a relatively small section of a larger work at a time because human beings subdivide as part of the cognitive process of creation, however there is still a need to access the entirety of a large document, as an example, for searching and replacing.
(which doesn't mean we would not offer a "project" option - as this is another issue). I think we should strive to achieve a better solution, that is transparent to the user but still enables handling long documents without buckling down or having a "manager" option. Thus, the user is not responsible to keep everything in order and the application doesn't really have to think on more than one shorter document at a time. Programmers find it hard to manage 1,000 pages in one document, so they create a "Master" or a "Book" to link all the document. Just like the non-WYSIWYG "view" the master document is a "pass the burden" solution to the problem. There are several very hard to solve problem involved in managing longer documents, and I'm not sure whether a master document is the right solution for that.
Is the early implementation of outlining in Mellel 1.8 by any chance headed in that direction (without the document trashing bug - View image here: -)? I have yearned for something like the Master Document 'feature' in word (except that it destroys documents). A problem I have found with every word processor, except TextEdit and Ulysses, is that they tend to choke on large documents (in the range of 100,000 words). Stronger content management options (index, search and replace with RegEx, cross-reference, sections, etc.).
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