While the precise amount of text data in a kilobyte or megabyte may differ depending on the type of document you’re working with, there’s usually around half that much stored per page.
What do you think is the size of a kilobyte? What about a megabyte?
The answers to these questions might surprise you. A kilobyte is actually 1000 bytes (the letter ‘k’ stands for 1000), and not 1024 as many people mistakenly believe.
- 1 KB = 1000 Bytes (in decimal)
- 1 KB = 1024 Bytes (in binary)
Similarly, a megabyte is actually 1 million bytes, or 1000000 in decimal notation. This means that if your laptop has 4 gigabytes of RAM (which it probably does), then it has 4000 million bytes or 4000000000 in decimal notation.
| Name | Bytes | Amount of Text |
| Kilobyte (KB) | 210 or 1,024 | 1/2 page |
| Megabyte (MB) | 220 or 1,048,576 | 500 pages |
Digital files are converted to binary data, which expresses letters and numbers through expressions of ones and zeros, for the purpose of displaying text in them. The amount of data in larger files is greater than smaller files because it contains more typed information.
You may not know it, but a kilobyte can store about one-half of a typewritten page. So for those who use computers and the Internet to write their books or articles need at least 2 KB per full text page they want printed in order to avoid any formatting problems with fonts sizes etcetera.
The size of a document is determined by the number of characters or bytes in it, divided by 1,024. A document with 1 kb of data or text would contain 1024 bytes or 1024 characters. Information about how the document should be formatted and other details so that it may be opened and utilized by a document processor.
