FAQ

General

Which documentation is available?

A help mindmap is available in the application (menu: Help->Documentation). It is a small documentation mostly suited for reference purposes.

The Freeplane wiki contains extensive documentation, but only on a few topics.

The Freeplane manual is currently under development.

Are there books about Freeplane?

Not yet. But there are a lot books on Mindmapping in general.

German readers might find a book about FreeMind to be useful: "FreeMind kompakt: Besser lernen, verstehen und entscheiden mit dem Open-Source-Mindmapping-Programm."

Why a new project? What made it worth forking from Freemind?

See the article on the Freeplane/FreeMind relationship.

Installation and Configuration

Where is the "user directory"?

The location of the Freeplane user directory can be found by in invoking the menu item Help->About. It's ~/.freeplane on Linux and %USERPROFILE%\.freemind on Windows.

Note that the user directory of test versions of the coming release 1.2 on Windows is %APPDATA%\freeplane\1.2.

Where do I find the log file?

Mainly for advanced features like Scripting you need to know where the log file is located. Find it in the user directory. It's named log.0 in most cases. If you have more than one Freeplane instance opened then it might have the name log.1 or even log.0.1. The most recently changed file matching the pattern log.* will be the one you are looking for.

Note that test versions for the coming 1.2 versions under Windows have a different user directory than the 1.1 series.

Translations

See the Translation FAQ

Troubleshooting

Html text and images can not be pasted from Web pages in nodes and notes on Linux

It is a java issue on linux. Use Firefox for Windows with Wine.

Links don't work in Flash export

This results from security policies for Flash. Flash works differently for local and internet swf files. External links can not be accessed from local flash files by default. The permission can be given using link http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager04.html . The links also work fine if you upload your flash to a web server and access it using http protocol. Everything is described on page http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/fplayer8_security_03.html

Nodes are not displayed properly on linux if the map is zoomed

Install the latest sun java from http://www.java.com/de/download/. The open jdk behaves buggy and is also significantly slower.

I cannot find the spell check function

The spell checker has to be enabled, see the Spell checker how-to.

The editor freezes

Create an entry in Mantis and provide as much information as possible about the conditions under which the behavior occurs:

• Does it happen always if you do ...?
• Is there a dependency on the size of the loaded map(s)?
• Post the output of "java -version" (it contains the build number)
• Do you have something special in your environment?
• Is Freeplane consuming computation power when it freezes or not?
• Before the freeze, was there any activity in the logfile? At least if there is anything suspicious, please post the logfile.
• Can you stop it with normal means (close window, send SIGTERM, ...)?
• Try a downgrade to an older Freeplane version - does that help?

It would be of great help in any case if you would provide a listing ("stacktrace") of what Freeplane is currently doing when it freezes by using the jstack tool. Find out the process id (PID) of the Freeplane Java process instance via Taskmanager, top, ps or whatever tool. Let's assume that the PID is 2345. Please post the output of

 jstack -l 2345

(You have to replace "2345" with the real PID.) For comparison also post the jstack output of Freeplane before the freeze (if possible). As you can easily check by inspecting the output it's pure technical stuff, nothing of your private mindmap is contained in it. Unfortunately you have to have the JDK installed to use jstack (the JRE wouldn't suffice). Please tell us, if you cannot install the JDK for some reason. - We might be able to help.

For more on jstack see its Sun documentation.

SourceForge asks me to log in repeatedly

This happens if you log in to SourceForge using OpenID. First log out, then create or log in to a full SourceForge account with a username and password. SourceForge support for OpenID is very limited and has numerous known issues, including incompatibility with our Mantis Bug Tracker.