This information was provided by Claris Corporation on 16 March 1998, and incorporated into Apple Computer's Tech Info Library.

Macintosh System 7 has a feature called Publish & Subscribe, which lets you select a part of your file, call it a Publisher, and link it to Subscribers in other files. If you make changes to the Publisher and use the Save command, the Subscriber is updated automatically. This works because data is stored on disk in an Edition File, which contains the data and any changes to the data. When you open a ClarisWorks 2.0 file with one or more Subscribers, the file checks every Subscriber's linked Edition File to see whether any changes have been made, and if there are changes, the Subscriber is updated.

If both files are open, you can see the updating happening on-screen when you choose Save in the file with the Publisher, because the Subscriber checks the Edition File for changes when it is open.

However, if you do not have both documents open at the same time, updates to the Subscriber from Published data stored in the Edition File will not take place until you actually open the document which contains the Subscriber. In addition, if you make changes to the Publisher and don't save them, the Subscriber will not be updated to show those changes.

This means that if you make changes to a ClarisWorks 2.0 or ClarisImpact file with the Publisher and save, then try to use the Print command from the Finder to print the file with the Subscriber, those changes will not be reflected in the printout. If you open a ClarisWorks or ClarisImpact file with the Subscriber, it will get the updated information from the Edition file on disk and print with the correctly-saved information from the Publisher.