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Why the enormous growth in file size from compatibility mode to Word 2013?

This concerns a file that began PDF life at 5 MB. It has a lot of math, logic symbols and some diagrams, and the symbols weren't unicode in the originating wordprocessor. Acrobat exported the file to DOCX as 10 MB. Opened and saved in Compatibility Mode in Word 2013, the file remained at 10 MB. Converted to Word 2013 and saved, it became 82 MB.

I've gone through the process 3 times. What could account for the enormous size increase, especially when compared with the next test?

A second file was converted. It was a PDF that this time originated as a scan. As a DOCX export from Acrobat it was 5.6 MB. After being converted from Compatibility Mode in Word 2013, it grew to only 6.5 MB. Yet it too has considerable math.

P.S. Despite taking a long time to load, the first file scrolls fast through its 1100 pages.
It looks as though the large growth in file size is to be expected, though the math and diagrams add extra. I took a second file that originated in another wordprocessor and not as a scan. It was 5.2 MB exported from Acrobat as DOCX. After being converted to Word 2013 from Compatibility Mode, the size grew to 18.4 MB. This time there was no math and no diagrams. As Suzanne points out in another thread, a PDF could be opened directly by Word 2013. When I did it with this PDF, the resulting file was 5.0 MB instead of 18.4. 

My PDF from scans wouldn't open directly because of errors. That's not really a loss, since even if it had opened, it would not have been searchable, just an image. But did it need to become 82 MB in Word 2013 as opposed to 10 in Compatibility Mode?

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Last updated October 5, 2021 Views 197 Applies to: