converting MC project to Rev

[Richard K. Herz]

Getting on the bandwagon, just converted a 60-stack project from MC to Rev.
Went reasonably well. Most script changes were converting file name
references from .mc to .rev.  "Snags" were:

Polygon graphics used to draw lines by script had to be converted to the new
"line" graphic style (which is present in MC but doesn't appear in the MC
IDE palette) since Rev automatically connects the first and last points of
polygon graphics whereas MC doesn't.

Data points were plotted by script by setting the templateGraphic to 2x2
pixel rectangles.  In the Rev IDE, these appeared as 120x120 rectangles.
This is because the default Rev IDE Preference settings for default object
sizes overrides the script when the script sets both height and width below
9 pixels. Changing the Rev IDE Preference setting for default graphic object
size to 2 fixed this.

Saving MC stacks to Rev changed the ID numbers of about 20% of my
custom icon images, which are kept in a separate stack placed "in use". In
buttons in other stacks whose icons were set to these images, the icon ID
number had the same change made to them on conversion to Rev. Numbers where
changed from the 999000-range I used for custom icons to something in the
1000-2000 range, which meant that the buttons showed images in the Rev
distribution rather than showing my custom icons.  Changing the ID of the
icon images and the icon ID setting in the buttons back to the 999000-range
fixed this.  Fix appears to be stable during Rev-to-Rev Save As.

The MC IDE replaces spaces in stack names with "_" to form the default stack
file name when saving a stack, so all my stacks had the "_".  When saving an
MC stack to Rev, the Save As dialog does not replace space with "_" in the
default stack file name.  Since references in my scripts were to the "_"
form, I manually added the "_" in the Save As dialog for each stack (or
could have written a script...).

For stacks you just want to "use" by double-clicking rather than edit, you
have to cmd-double-click in Rev to open in Player.  To have stacks open
in Player in Rev with simple double-click, make a copy of the Rev engine and
give it a name that doesn't start with "rev".  Define a new file-type with
extension like ".rv" and specify it to be opened by the renamed copy of Rev
engine.  New file type opens in Player with double-click. Change extension
back to .rev to edit, then back to .rv to use with double-click.

Rich Herz
herz at ucsd.edu
www.reactorlab.net