Swap to the 64 bit Sense Editor to overcome 32 bit 2GB Memory limitations and handle larger documents.

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Sense with separately installable QDA Plugin provides various tabulations of Tagged Text within the main document: Links in the QDA Tag Analysis View may be opened to show tags within their line context.

Sense with QDA Plugin

The Sense Open Document dialog showing a Browsed Web Page: The separately installable HTML Plugin supports conversion of the displayed web page into a Sense Document.

Web Page in Open Dialog Browser

With the separately installable Sense OPML Editor Plugin, OPML Documents may be created, edited and published: The view shows a New Outline Form with Type set to RSS.

Sense with OPML Editor Plugin

With the separately installable Sense RSS Editor Plugin, Rss Feed documents may be created, edited and published: The view shows its "Feed Reader" pane with XML rendered into Html.

Sense with RSS Editor Plugin

With the separately installable Sense RTF Plugin, RTF documents may be opened and saved. Sense Document styling is hierarchical from Editor level Styling, Document Level Styling down to individual lines. By default, lines of the same object type (eg Section, Paragraph) assume the Document Level Style. On saving a document to RTF, the various styles are translated to RTF Named Paragraph and List styles that may be selectable in third party editors. The screenshot shows the Sense Startup Tutorial opened in Microsoft Word with document links and styles. On RTF open within Sense, a "best fit" approach is used to convert RTF to Sense styles.

Sense with RTF Plugin

The screenshot shows Notepad with text defining a document heading outline based on tab indents. When the text file is opened within Sense via its separately installable TXT Plugin, selection of the Outline Conversion Method enables a hierarchy of Sections and sub-Sections to be produced according to tab indent levels. On Save, the reverse conversion may be optionally selected.

Sense and the TXT Plugin

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Why 64 bit Sense?

Issue 2 (May 2014)

The straightforward answer is that as 64 bit, the Sense Editor overcomes the 2GB Memory limitations of 32 bit Sense enabling it to handle larger documents.

However, before swapping, it is important to understand the advantages, differences, and dependencies of 64-bit software before deciding whether 64-bit or 32-bit Sense will best suit your needs.

Memory Limitations

32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems have a theoretical limit of 2 GB of memory for a .NET process - in reality, the memory available for actual data may be much smaller.

32 bit memory limitations also apply when running 32 bit applications in the compatibily (WOW64) layer on Windows 64 bit Operating Systems.

As a generalization, 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows typically support up to 192 GB of installed memory - in practise, the memory available is limited by the amount of installed memory.

Data Processing

Increasing demands for data processing means that 32 bit applications are more frequently running into memory addressing limitations.

Data is stored in many formats but, again as a generalisation, formats divide between compact binary and verbose text. Binary data processing is, by its nature, usually more efficient in terms of both processor and memory demands. XML is text based with the result that documents tend to be larger placing higher demands for memory and processor power.

Sense documents are XML with the consequence that, as with other XML data processing applications, there is increased susceptibility to 32 bit system memory limitation even for comparatively small XML files.

Memory Requirements

64-bit applications will require more memory than their 32 bit counterparts to process the same data. This is because data types, memory pointers and other structures automatically become larger as well as the space needed for the application runtime code itself.

In general, it is recommended that a minimum of 4 GB of memory should be installed to gain benefits from running a 64-bit application.

Performance Considerations

The most important consideration to migrate to 64 bit Sense is whether 32 bit Sense has, or is likely to, run out of memory. Although it is not possible to reliably predict memory exhaustion merely from document size, an early warning might be achieved using Print Preview.

If memory limitations are not being encountered then performance (speed) becomes the dominent consideration.

There is no rule of thumb by which it may be said that switching to 64 bit Sense will result in improved processing performance.

For example, if the machine has 2GB of memory then performance may be well be slower simply because 64 bit applications have to shift more data. With 4 GB or more, then it might be expected that performance will be faster.

Possibly the best advice is to simply try out 64 bit Sense: reversion to 32 bit Sense is straightforward with more important information provided within the Release News of Sense Help.

A Sense license is valid for both 32 bit and 64 bit installations.