FAQ

General

Which documentation is available?

The Freeplane manual is currently in work.

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.

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.

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.

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 this Wiki page.