Howdy Monks. I am having a strange problem with Win32::OLE and Word. Running this simple script:
use strict;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Word';
my $filename = 'C:\temp\test.doc';

my $word = Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application', 'Quit');
my $doc = $word->Documents->Open($filename) || die("Unable to open doc
+ument ", Win32::OLE->LastError());
my $nwords = $doc->Words->Count;

my @wordtext;
my @wordcolor;
my $starttime = time;
for(my $i = 1; $i <= $nwords; $i++)    {
    $wordcolor[$i] = $doc->Words->Item($i)->HighlightColorIndex;
    $wordtext[$i] = $doc->Words->Item($i)->Text;
}
my $elapsed = time - $starttime;
printf "\n\n%6.0D words\n%6.0D sec\n%5.3f per word", $nwords, $elapsed
+, $elapsed/$nwords;
$doc->Close;
undef $word;

[download]
on a 30 page paper results in a processing rate of 0.158 sec/word, or about 379 words per minute on a P4 3.4 ghz with many gigs of memory. Now I know OLE is a dog, but that's about human reading speed! Clearly something is wrong.

The stranger thing is that I did some experimenting, and the words-per-second rate is a linear function of the number of words in the document. In other words, the reading rate is twice as fast for a document half the size, twice as slow for a document twice the size, and so on. This one really baffles me bc I can't imagine why the size of the document would influence the reading speed unless it has to count from the beginning every time you request a word, and surely they didn't design the method like that.

So I checked the archives and found this thread about Word slowness and tried some of the suggested fixes. Disbling the Word macro checker and diabling the DEP helped maybe a little but didn't solve the problem.

Anybody know how I can speed this thing up? Can I get the text and color info in larger chunks, maybe?

Many thanks....

Steve

In reply to Win32 Word behaving strangely by cormanaz

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