My favorite part of Tellico, is the ability to customize my fields.

One of the customizations I was planning, was a database of quotes.


However, some of the quotes I want to include are quite large.


Is Tellico built, to allow large blocks of text in the paragraph inputs?

And if it is, how well does the .tc file format scale, to large amounts of text?

Additionally, is there any way now (or in future plans) to compress the .tc file format internally? (or must that be done externally)

Ademos wrote:Is Tellico built, to allow large blocks of text in the paragraph inputs?

And if it is, how well does the .tc file format scale, to large amounts of text?

Additionally, is there any way now (or in future plans) to compress the .tc file format internally? (or must that be done externally)

Tellico should be able to store blocks of text without problem. It won't be very efficient for searching the text, though if you need to do that.

The .tc file is a zipped XML file, so it's fairly well compressed.

Not being able to search is a pretty major problem if you are trying to use tellico as a quote book, unfortunately.

TheBlackCat wrote:Not being able to search is a pretty major problem if you are trying to use tellico as a quote book, unfortunately.

Read carefully, please. I did not say Tellico couldn't search, just that it wouldn't be efficient. SQL databases and the like have text indexing features so that if you have megabytes of text, you can search the whole database efficiently. For that, Tellico would need to embed a text indexing library like Lucerne or something, which it doesn't.

If you have thousands of book chapters, then no, I really don't think Tellico is the tool for you. If you have hundreds of paragraphs, Tellico's linear search might work well enough. I'd suggest just trying it out. The import/export capabilities are such that you should be able to use the data you save in some other software if you decide Tellico is not for you.

robbystephenson wrote:Tellico should be able to store blocks of text without problem. It won't be very efficient for searching the text, though if you need to do that.

The .tc file is a zipped XML file, so it's fairly well compressed.

That's great news!

Thank you for the quick answer.


As for searching, most of my entries are organized by categories or names, so searching is usually unnecessary for my uses.

robbystephenson wrote:

TheBlackCat wrote:Not being able to search is a pretty major problem if you are trying to use tellico as a quote book, unfortunately.

Read carefully, please. I did not say Tellico couldn't search, just that it wouldn't be efficient. SQL databases and the like have text indexing features so that if you have megabytes of text, you can search the whole database efficiently. For that, Tellico would need to embed a text indexing library like Lucerne or something, which it doesn't.

If you have thousands of book chapters, then no, I really don't think Tellico is the tool for you. If you have hundreds of paragraphs, Tellico's linear search might work well enough. I'd suggest just trying it out. The import/export capabilities are such that you should be able to use the data you save in some other software if you decide Tellico is not for you.

I understand that, but the whole point of having a quote book is that you want to search the quotes, so inefficient searching is a deal-breaker. I have over 150 pages of quotes, many with more than 20 quotes per page, and most quotes being several lines of text, so that is a lot of text.

TheBlackCat wrote:I understand that, but the whole point of having a quote book is that you want to search the quotes, so inefficient searching is a deal-breaker. I have over 150 pages of quotes, many with more than 20 quotes per page, and most quotes being several lines of text, so that is a lot of text.

It certainly sounds like you need a SQL backend then, with either a web-based frontend or something that will talk to it.

TheBlackCat wrote:I understand that, but the whole point of having a quote book is that you want to search the quotes, so inefficient searching is a deal-breaker. I have over 150 pages of quotes, many with more than 20 quotes per page, and most quotes being several lines of text, so that is a lot of text.

I'm curious as to what you're using currently?