Thinking like a program

Sometimes you just have to think the way the original programmers did -- and with a program like PageMaker that may mean thinking the way they would have done in the 1980s.

This week there was a plea from an editor who had some ancient files originally created in PageMaker 5 (that's back at the time the program was owned by a company called Aldus and when it was a stablemate of FreeHand rather than Illustrator).

They just wouldn't open -- or rather they would start to open and then bring up a message of "Cannot complete action - File not found".

This wasn't the usual problem of cross-platform files; they'd been created on a Mac and this was still a Mac.

The user was keen enough to check via BBEdit that the file structure he'd recreated was identical to that used when the file was created -- but still no luck.

Eventually, and almost in desperation, I suggested: "What may be worth trying is to move all the linked files to somewhere where the program can't possibly find them, and then see if you can get the files to open with lost link messages."

That's not so easy as operating systems have become increasingly clever -- our user moved the linked files to the desktop, and they were still found. Fortunately the Mac OS creators left one place where the intelligence of the system won't follow -- the trash.

With the linked files in the trash, the latest PageMaker opened the ancient files without a hiccup. Then the linked files were moved back from trash to the original folder, and they relinked without a hitch.

In our voyage of discovery I reinstalled PageMaker 5 and it is now sitting happily alongside InDesign. I also found my original floppies for PageMaker 4, but they remain untouched -- for now.