Legacy and file format issues

Howard Bornstein howard.bornstein at gmail.com
Thu Sep 13 13:58:03 EDT 2007


A few years ago, I wrote an information mapping application for a company
that creates information maps (!!) that runs on both Macs and Windows
platforms. Recently one of the people from the company contacted me because
it no longer worked on his new Intel-Mac.

I recompiled the app under 2.8.1 as a universal binary. However, besides
needing UB, he is getting hit by the change in file formats that happened in
V2.7 of Rev.

The Maps they create are really stacks and when he creates a stack under the
UB version, it is no longer readable under the older, pre-UB (read: made
with Rev 2.6.1) version. These maps are shared among various people, using
various versions of my application, so they need to be compatible across
versions. The easy solution is to save all the maps in the legacy format.
I've confirmed this works by manually saving the stack in the legacy format
via the IDE. It is then readable with the older standalone version of my
program.

The problem I'm having is that I can not find any way to save stacks in the
legacy format from within my program. The only information I've found on
this anywhere is three lines in the "What's New" document saying that the
IDE can save in the new and the old format. There is nothing in the
dictionary and nothing in the PDF docs. Surely there must be some way to
save in Legacy format from within Transcript! Have I missed something
obvious somewhere?

In addition, I couldn't find any way to determine which format a file was
already saved in. This seems fairly crucial since reading a stack saved in
the new format from an app assuming the legacy format creates, uh, a bizarre
experience. Surely there must be some way to determine beforehand if this
will happen.

So, basically I'm looking for two things:

1) How can you select between the new format and the legacy format when
saving a stack with Transcript?

2) How can you determine what format an existing stack has been saved in?

And where is the documentation on this fairly significant change in
Revolution?


-- 
Regards,

Howard Bornstein
-----------------------
www.designeq.com



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