One of Publish and Subscribe’s most useful applications is that its editions can be linked over a network. Ellen can publish the month’s sales figures onto her hard drive; whenever she’s got File Sharing turned on, Mike, Ted, and Joe can subscribe to those numbers from their own Macs.
If Ellen changes those numbers when they’re not online, System 7 intelligently socks away an internal memo to itself. When the guys finally turn on their Macs, the subscribers’ files are updated when they open the documents in question.
Overlapping, nested, and embedded publishers
Most programs let you get pretty fancy with selecting material for publishing. Suppose that you select a page in a ClarisWorks word processor document and publish it (save it as an edition file). Then you decide you also want to publish just the third paragraph. You can. Your document will fill up with those gray outline borders, but you can do it.
The word processors we checked even let you create overlapping publishers — that is, paragraphs 1–3 are one edition and paragraphs 2–4 are another. Graphics programs, too, can create either overlapping or nested publishers. (Some programs somewhere probably don’t let you get that elaborate; they’ll tell you “no” by dimming the Create Publisher command when you select something that overlaps or sits inside another publisher.) You can even publish material that includes subscribed material.
Changing subscribed text
Here’s a handy Secret if you subscribe to some text created in the same program (that is, you’ve subscribed to a block of text from MacWrite Pro that was created in MacWrite Pro).
You can reformat the entire subscribed block of text at once: change its font or size; adjust the margins; change the line spacing; and move or delete the entire block. Of course, you can’t edit, delete, or format individual words or portions of the material. Nor can you make even those full-block editing activities to subscribed text from a different program.
How does it know?
If you work with Publish and Subscribe very much, you’ll begin to notice a sweet but baffling feature. Each time you use the Subscribe To command, you’ll discover that the Mac automatically finds the folder and even the edition file that you created most recently. You’re spared the hassle of navigating your folders in search of that edition you just published.
Turns out that the Mac knows because it takes notes. To be accurate, unbeknownst to you, it creates an alias of the edition. It stores this alias in the Preferences folder inside your System Folder. When you use a Subscribe To command, the Mac consults this alias, which points it to the correct edition file on your disk.
Where else to look for Publisher or Subscriber Options
If a program doesn’t have a Publisher Options or Subscriber Options command, it may have hidden them away. Try double-clicking within the gray borders in a document to see if the appropriate dialog box comes up. If not, try Option–double-clicking.
Same disk
After you create an edition file, you can rename it in the Finder without interfering with its links to other documents. You can’t, however, move it to a different disk. If you do that, the subscriber document won’t be able to find it, and the link will be broken. (For the same reason, if you’re on a network that relies on a central server Mac, you need to create the edition file on the server disk for Publish and Subscribe to work.)
