Sasa3k,
I will answer the remaining in your first series of questions soon.
This is the answer to your question of why the STAAD output viewer takes a significant amount of time to open large ANL files.
The answer is, the viewer is attempting to present the data in a specific format. It has to parse the ANL file for
Notes
Warnings
Error messages
Page breaks
Words that are in bold
Special characters that are used to display figures such as reinforcing bar layout
Display the information in two panes with a table of contents on the left pane
etc.
Since the viewer also acts as a tool for printing the ANL file, it also checks the number of lines on each page to ensure that there is no spillover to an un-numbered page. All these activities take time if the file is large, and by large, I mean ANL files which are several hundred KBs or more.
Having said that, I admit that it could do with a few improvements, particularly in that time taken. Your observations have been passed on to the software development group.
Notepad is significantly faster, but it does not display the data in the formatted manner that the viewer does. While it gains in speed, it loses in presentability of that information.
If you wish to use an alternative viewer that can display the data in a similar fashion, you could try Notepad++. Here is one link you could get it from.
download.cnet.com/.../3000-2352_4-10327521.html
Though I haven't used it, I understand that you can customize it to display text and extended ASCII characters in the way you want, and probably faster.