save dialogue stuck

[Friedrich F. Grohmann]

I highly appreciate Jacqueline's comments sent on 21.2.2004 10:30. At the 
very beginning she wrote:

>
>You mentioned this was a fairly large stack, as Rev goes. 5,500 cards is 
>pretty much the limit in Rev. A stack this size will normally take a 
>while to save. 

To be honest, this statement struck me like lightening. One of the HC 
stacks I use most often has more than 30 000 cards and stands at 5.9 MB. 
It is a dictionary which works flawlessly and as swift as I could wish in 
tandem with another stack containing text. As a matter of fact, it is 
still growing in size. In more than four years of frequently daily and 
intensive use, I had a single case of card corruption which, if I 
remember correctly, had to do with some mechanical mishap not with the 
operation of the stack itself. This problem was dealt with very easily.

That's my experience with HC. Despite the size, despite different scripts 
 in the stacks I develop for my research and also for teaching purposes 
(things like Chinese, Devanagari or Tibetan), these stacks are reliable 
and a joy to use. 

I am now thinking of moving to Rev and you mention 5500 cards come close 
to the limit. This is indeed very, very bad news for me. I rushed to 
check the Rev  documentation and it says that the maximum number of 
objects in a stack is "unlimited." Admittedly I'm getting confused. The 
stack in question has now 1.2 MB. Is this too much for Rev under OS X? 

> I've also noticed that sometimes you have to move the 
>cursor outside the window and back again before it will redraw, so the 
>shape you see may not always tell you what the actual state is. Try 
>moving the mouse to check, before resorting to a second "save".

I've done that. It didn't help.
>
>Since this is an imported HC stack, there may be other problems too. It 
>is very important to compact the stack in HC at least twice in a row 
>before importing it to Revolution, especially one this large. If the 
>stack was not thoroughly compacted before import, there could be lots of 
>extraneous junk in there that is slowing down the save process in Rev. 
>This seems a likely culprit to me.

I cannot imagine that this is the problem here. Years ago I learned 
through the HC list, I seem to remember even through some of your 
contributions, about the advantage of compacting twice in a row after 
sorting the cards of a stack. Since the stack in question here is another 
dictionary project of mine and needs to be sorted when new cards have 
been added, the sort button script includes double compact. The copy I 
opened in Rev was a sorted stack.

>
>Finally, try setting the HCAddressing property to false. You don't need 
>it in Rev. I don't really think this will make all that much difference, 
>but I usually do it anyway. It does affect some aspects of stack 
>behavior sometimes, and you don't need it to be true when working in 
>Revolution.
>

I was not aware of this property and happily followed your suggestion. So 
far, saving works fine and hopefully stays that way. 

Thank you so much for your help.

Fritz