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Application Note 1

Opening More Than One File At Once


By default, PFE allows you to open only one file at a time in the various file opening dialogs; this is a change in behaviour from early releases, which allowed multiple selection.

The change was introduced because of a design error in Windows NT affecting all releases up to and including 3.51; the file opening dialogs (which are part of Windows rather than of PFE) did not handle names containing spaces correctly when multiple selection was permitted.

Accordingly, in 0.06.002 the design changed to allow only single files to be selected by default, and for consistency the change was made in both the 32-Bit and 16-Bit Editions.

With Windows NT 4.0 the problems have been resolved; but the PFE interfaces have remained in their changed form, allowing single selection by default.

However, it's easy to configure PFE to allow multiple files to be selected.

You will now be able to open multiple files as before.

With the 16-Bit Edition under Windows 3.1x there are no side effects to working in this way.

With the 32-Bit Edition under Windows NT 3.51, enabling multiple selection means that you will see long file names that contain spaces as 8.3 names in the dialogs. There is no way to have multiple selection and the ability to see all filenames.

With the 32-Bit Edition under Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 all file names will be displayed correctly; however the standard dialog that Windows uses allows only a fairly small number of files to be selected together


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