How to edit the comment text in the pof file

I spoke to my Altera rep and he let me know there would never be any offical help form altera for editing the pof files. the reason i want to is I have inherited some legacy designs which I'm told only support programming via pof files over JTAG. I have been able to get an automated version number into the design so it can report the version thats running, however, I wanted to get a version number in to programming file to verify the version before the code was loaded on at site.