Home: What's New: If You've Used Version 3: Reusing Your Version 3 Work

Reusing Your Version 3 Work

The Geometer's Sketchpad Version 4 allows you to reuse almost all of the sketches and scripts you've created in Version 3.

Using Version 3 Sketches

Most Version 3 sketches can be opened in Version 4 with all their contents intact, and with at most minor differences in formatting and appearance. While some Version 3 sketches contain objects that are fundamentally unsupported in Version 4, even those documents can be partially opened, preserving all other elements of the sketch. (Unsupported objects include Macintosh publishers, imported objects such as imported graphics and sound, equations of lines and circles, and values derived from such equations.)

Using Version 3 Scripts

Although Sketchpad Version 4 doesn't directly support Version 3 scripts, you can convert your Version 3 scripts into Version 4 custom tools by the following procedure:

  1. Using Sketchpad Version 3, open the script file you want to convert.

  2. Open a blank sketch.

  3. Construct the required Given objects in the blank sketch.

  4. Select the Given objects and play the script into the sketch.

  5. Save the resulting sketch, and quit Sketchpad 3.

  6. Using Sketchpad Version 4, open the sketch you just saved in Version 3.

  7. Select all objects in the sketch.

  8. Choose Create New Tool from the Custom Tools menu.

  9. Give your new tool a name.

10. Save the sketch using an appropriate name (perhaps the same name as that of the tool).

Once the script has been saved as a custom tool in a Version 4 document, you can use that tool any time the document is open. You can also collect multiple tools into a single document, and you can place the document in Sketchpad's Tool Folder so that its tools are always available.

See also
Custom Tools
Tool Folder

Sketches and Scripts from before Version 3

Any sketch or script created by an earlier version of Sketchpad (Version 1 or Version 2) must be opened and resaved in Version 3 before you can use it in Version 4. Version 4 cannot directly open files from versions of Sketchpad earlier than Version 3.