save dialogue stuck

Friedrich F. Grohmann shedrup at ms9.hinet.net
Tue Feb 24 06:39:29 EST 2004


Some members of the list -Dom, Jacqueline, and Richard- were so kind to 
offer further, highly informative explanations regarding the "Rev as 
database" issue. My gratitude to all of them. Obviously, I have to 
rethink the wisdom of transferring stacks of this type to Rev.

As a matter of fact, what I called "dictionaries" are not the simple 
databases one is probably prone to associate with the term. These stacks 
are part and parcel of my research work interacting between each other 
and further stacks with large amounts of text. Most of the cards also 
contain "active text". 

Moreover, since I am a philologist dealing basically with ancient Asian 
scriptures a number of different scripts of both, the one-byte and the 
two-byte variety are involved. Years ago, wondering whether a database 
might facilitate my work I tried FileMaker. Though I'm still using some 
stuff I did then for everyday tasks, my conclusion was that it was far 
from being able to deal with texts in the way I needed it.

HyperCard turned out to be incomparably more flexible and powerful. 
Different scripts like Chinese, Devanagari, and Roman with lots of 
diacritics happily populating one and the same field, all the possible 
variants of the "find" command, seamless communication between different 
stacks - almost a dream come true. 

This does not mean I'm saying HC is perfect. Occasionally, for reasons 
wildly beyond me, it fails to find what is plainly there but so far I've 
never come across other software which would serve the specific needs of 
this aspect of my work better than HC. 

Still, I will continue experimenting with Rev and want to thank everybody 
once more for the generous input.



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