Along with the usual bug fixes, several significant changes were made to 3.4 which I felt ought to be emphasized. A more complete list of changes is contained in the ﾒAdd/Strip 3.4 Changesﾓ section of Add/Stripｪ 3.4 Docs.
Significant Changes in Add/Strip (A/S) 3.4
･ Requires System 6.0.4 or later
A/S now requires certain code resources which exist in System 6.0.4 and later versions of the Mac OS. It will simply refuse to run under previous System versions.
All program options are available when using System 7.0 or later. A few are disabled under previous System versions. Future versions of A/S will likely require System 7.0 or later.
･ Clipboard text processing and viewing is available
Processing text on the clipboard has been a fairly common request over the years. I finally got tired of justifying why A/S couldnﾕt do it and simply added several ways to interact with clipboard text. Since the clipboard is usually shared by applications, A/S will copy text from it to a temporary file and then process that file. In this way, A/S can be sent safely into the background where it can continue working on text from the clipboard while the true clipboard is available for use by the user in the application in the front.
Clipboard text can be processed to a new file or processed and placed back onto the clipboard.
Clipboard text can be browsed although it is subject to the same size restrictions imposed when browsing TEXT files.
The contents of existing TEXT files can be placed onto the clipboard, provided there is sufficient available memory. Press the option key when selecting the File menu to see the menu item for this command.
･ Dynamic File menu items
Several File menu items will now change dynamically when the option or shift keys are pressed or released to reveal several additional commands or command variants. Previous versions of A/S had some of these commands too, but the File menu was not truly dynamic.
Most of these dynamic items should make sense. For instance, to process clipboard text to a new file (menu item ﾒProcess Clipboardﾉﾓ) you would press command-K while to process clipboard text and place it back onto the clipboard (menu item ﾒProcess Clipboardﾓ) you would press command-option-K. Balloon Help is available for all menu items.
･ Increased the maximum size of BOF, EOF, Merge, and Comments to 2048 characters
The previous limit of 255 characters was a nuisance, especially for the BOF and EOF strings. Since all of these items use much of the same code, it was easy enough to increase the maximum length for all of them.
I also changed the window type from a modal type to a movable modal to make it easier to switch to another application while one of these windows was open.
･ Increased the maximum size of Replacements and Line Replacements to 125 characters
I thought the previous limit of 64 characters was adequate but a couple people suggested that it ought to be increased. In the course of increasing the maximum length, I improved the way I store these strings in RAM so that shorter strings will use less memory than longer strings. Previously all strings required the same amount of RAM storage regardless of length.
If you use many or longer replacement strings, or process larger files, you may wish to increase the amount of memory allocated to A/S in the Finder's Get Info window. More memory will allow A/S to increase the size of the bites it takes as it chews its way through your files.
･ Increased the maximum Replacement sets to 250 and maximum Line Replacement sets to 150
I canﾕt imagine why anyone would need 400 replacement sets, but I increased the amounts anyway. Since I restructured the way I handle replacement sets in memory, its is much easier to increase the maximum definable sets. Both maximums are wholly arbitrary on my part. Provided there is adequate memory, I could just as easily allow thousands of replacement sets.
Note that larger numbers of replacement sets will require more memory and somewhat more processing time, with longer sets (sets with more characters entered) needing the most of each.
･ Line Replacement ﾒAny Char wildcard-onlyﾓ find strings match lines shorter than the number of wildcards
Line Replacement sets allow a series of Any Char wildcards (with no other characters) to be used as the find string to match unknown characters at the beginning or the end of lines. Past versions of A/S would not match a line when the line contained fewer characters than the number of wildcards specified in the find string. This is no longer the case.
A find string of ﾒ^?^?^?^?^?ﾓ represents five unknown characters. When the same find string is used in a Line Replacement set and the Where pop-up menu is set to ﾒAt Beginningﾓ, it represents up to five unknown characters at the start of each line. If a line contains five or fewer characters, the entire line is matched.
