Choosing Filenames.

The Project Manager keeps track of which files have been closed and which files have compiled. It does this by looking for files with the same name as the Project File or the same name as the individual Data Files. For example, if you had a data file called WIND.DAT, it would look for the corresponding closed data file WIND.CLP and the plot file WIND.PLT. For this reason, you should be careful to name your Project Files and Data Files with different names. For example, if you have a project called WIND.MAK and a data file called WIND.DAT, the Project Manager will not be able to tell if the plot file WIND.PLT is an image of the whole project or just the data in WIND.DAT. As a result, the Project Manager may display only part of the cave when you were expecting to see the whole project and vice versa.

You can circumvent the problem by forcing the Project Manager to re-close and re-compile the data. You can do this using the Processing Options.Generally, however, it is better to use unique filenames for projects and data files. If you already have duplicate Project and Data File Names, you can rename the files using the Windows File Manager.

Long Filenames. With early versions of DOS and Windows 3.1, filenames were limited to an eight-character name and three-character extension. These short filenames did not allow any spaces. Starting with Windows-95, the operating system allowed for long filenames. With Long Filenames, the name-part can be 256 characters long, with the same three-character extension.

The current version of Compass supports Long Filenames for Project File names and Data File names. If you are still using older versions of Compass for Windows 3.1 or DOS, you may want to limit your filenames to eight characters so the files will be compatible with older programs. However, even if you do use long filenames, older Windows and DOS programs will still be able to use the data because Windows also creates a short filename to be used with these programs. The only issue is that the short filename is often not very readable. For example, the short filename for “Lech Cave.dat” is  “LECHCA~1.DAT”.