Bugzilla Bug 1983

I was typing a document, and noticed that the file it was stored in became very
large very quickly.  When I completed, the 4-page document (Times New Roman,
12pt) totaled almost one megabyte.  I examined the file to determine the cause,
and was immediately surprised by the number of tags present.  I have excerpted a
sentence (14 words, included below), to illustrate:

<c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">He</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:n
trl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">then</c><c props="lang:en-US;
dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">settled</c><c props="lang
:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">in</c><c
props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">a</c><c props=
"lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">small</c><c
props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">commun
ity</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US;
dir:ltr">outside</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US;
dir:ltr">the</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="lang:en-US;
dir:ltr">city</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c props="
lang:en-US; dir:ltr">and</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c
props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">took</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><
c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">up</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:ntrl"> </c><c
props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">writing</c><c props="lang:en-US; dir:n
trl">.  </c>
As is visible, the tag pair '<c props="lang:en-US; dir:ltr">...</c>' is utilized
once for each word, and '<c props="lang:en-Us; dir:ntrl">...</c>' is utilized
for continuous runs of intervening spaces.  As I have not looked at the .abw DTD
yet, I have not determined whether this is a format specification problem, or
(hopefully) an implementation problem.

I have determined that "dir:ltr" == "direction: left-to-right", but I have not
figured out "dir:ntlr".  There is probably some hidden problem that I do not
see, but to me, the obvious solution is to remove the "dir:ntlr" formatting for
spaces.  As an unofficial test, I removed all tags from my 1-meg document, and
ended up with a 15kB file.  Even though this is not exactly realistic, assuming
that the necessary tags in the document used 95kB, the size of the document will
still be 10% of what it was, a sizeable (no pun intended) savings indeed.

I am using the latest (as of 999907606) Debian GNU/Linux/PPC abiword package.

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 247 ***

Yep, it's a duplicate.  Marking as CLOSED.