In looking at the Pd files created with 0.43.4-extended and 0.45.4 vanilla, I notice that the floatatom in 0.45.4 is:
#X floatatom XPOS YPOS 0 0 0 - - -, f 5;

However, in 0.43.4 extended, the same floatatom would look like:
#X floatatom XPOS YPOS 0 0 0 - - -;

The online documentation of the file format mentions nothing about the ", f 5;" portion added in the newer vanilla version. Is this a new change or something specific to Pd extended? The 0.45.4 vanilla Pd can't load Pd files using the other floatatom specification, so this seems to break backwards compatibility.

Hi dal9000,

That ", f 5" syntax is a unilateral change made by Miller Puckette with no input from the Pd community (at least as far as I can tell). The "f 5" controls the width in characters for t_text objects: atom boxes, object boxes, comments, and message boxes. If you just use the default width for object boxes or message boxes, then that formatting code doesn't appear. (Yet it does appear for the floatatom box by default, as you show.) Anyway, the moment you stretch the box by putting the mouse on the right and click-dragging, the formatting code is appended to the relevant line in the patch file.

I tried a few things:

1. create a patch with a number box (floatatom) in 0.43 and opened it in 0.45.0. Works fine.
2. create same patch in 0.45.0, manually remove the ", f 5", reopen in 0.45.0. Works fine.
3. create same patch in 0.45.0, open in 0.43. Error: canvas: no method for 'f'

So it seems that 0.45.0 is backward compatible. (Except for the sense of #3, but it's very difficult to have that kind of two-way compatibility between versions.) If you're getting an error trying #2 above with 0.45.4, please make a bug report on the Sourceforge Tracker and send a message to the Pd mailing list at
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list