Notebook Conversion Woes
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg6729] Notebook Conversion Woes
- From: sch at mitre.org (Stu Schaffner)
- Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 02:16:24 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: The MITRE Corp.
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
I have a quantity of Mathematica 2.2 notebooks that I developed on a
Mac. I now have Mathematica 3.0 on a Wintel machine (Windows 95), and
have been having trouble converting the old files. I have several
questions:
1. What triggers the dialog about converting a pre-3.0 notebook,
as opposed to Mathematica simply opening the text form with all
the formatting information? It seems to have something to do
with Windows file extensions, but I can't find an approach
that works consistently.
2. When, by Monte Carlo methods (monkeys at a keyboard), I am able
to get MMA 3.0 to execute its dialog to "convert" a notebook, it
renders the notebook useless. The primary problem is that the
notebooks contain Format expressions for some of the more complex
data structures. In MMA 2.2 these expressions were applied
just before output was presented to the user. The 2.2-3.0
converter seems to have applied the Format statements to the
notebook itself, then thrown the Format statements away. This
destroys my function libraries.
3. In my function libraries, I have extensive (*..*)-delimited
documentation at the beginning of cells. This all disappears
in the "conversion". Looking at the text form of a notebook,
I see that each cell starts with a (*..*)-delimited cell-style
definition and that this definition is merged with any leading
comments. It seems that the converter throws the entire comment
block away, even if it contains more than just MMA-generated
statements.
4. I do have access to a Mac MMA 3.0, but not easily. Must I do
the conversion from 2.2 to 3.0 on a Mac before moving the
notebooks to Windows?
Stu Schaffner
The MITRE Corp.
sch at mitre.org