Have you tried the trick with creating a new user and using Freeway as that user yet? It’s almost mathematically impossible to tell you what might be going wrong here, as Mac OS X is a Unix, and heir to its ancestors’ tens of thousands of tiny text files with specific permissions set on each.
Freeway’s font handling code has been replaced in many places over the past dozen years, but it harkens back to the bad old days of Mac OS 8 and QuickDraw GX. The bodies buried in that yard are many, and they didn’t die easily or well. Most other applications on your Mac do not rely on the same parts of the OS as Freeway does, and would not be as susceptible to bugs in that legacy code.
Using Freeway as a new made-up user is an effort to remove as many possible moving parts so that a base can be established for diagnosing the problem. It is not a solution to the problem. Try these steps, and report back what happens after you have done so.
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Create a new user on your Mac, using the System Preferences application, Users and Groups pane. Do not give this user administrator privileges, but do not restrict it in any way (Parental Controls or similar).
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Make a duplicate of your Freeway document, and place it in the folder /Users/Shared. Once you have moved it there, click once on the file and choose File/Get Info from the main menu. At the bottom of the file inspector, make sure that everyone is set to Read & Write.
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Log out from your Mac (Apple menu, Log out [your name]), and log in as the new user you created in step 1.
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Navigate to the Shared folder, double-click the Freeway document, and see what happens.
Things to look for: You may see a list of missing fonts. Each user has their own font collection, so what we have done by adding a new user is isolated the document from the preferences you have built up in your existing user account. Make a note of the fonts that you see listed, but do not enable them. Use the document without them (why yes, Times is boring and ugly in the wrong context). Make changes to the document, save, publish (make a new Site Folder so you don’t step on your old one). See what happens at this point.
Now if you cannot get Freeway to crash any more, log out as your new user, and back in as your original user, and make a new copy of the original Freeway document. Place it in the Shared folder again, overwriting the copy you made earlier. Log out and back in as your new user, and this time, enable half of the fonts on your list of missing fonts. Then launch Freeway and see what happens again when you use it to edit the document.
If you can repeat the crash at this point, quit Freeway, then disable half of the fonts you just enabled. Launch Freeway again, and open the document. If you can repeat the crash, then close another half of the suspect fonts (Freeway must be quit while you are doing this font list changing business) and see if it still crashes. At some point, you will narrow in on the precise font that is to blame, if any of them are.
Conversely, if you cannot make it crash with the first half of the list enabled, then quit Freeway, and disable the first half and enable the second half. Repeat as above, and narrow down to the font or fonts that make it crash.
If, no matter what combination of fonts you enable, you still cannot make it crash as a new user, then the issue is likely your Freeway preferences, or remotely possible, one or another image used in your document. (The latter is unlikely, that usually just stops you saving, publishing or editing a document; it won’t usually crash Freeway itself.)
To test this out, log out as your new user, back in as your existing user, and open up your Preferences folder. This is normally hidden in Lion and above, so in Finder, hold down the Option key and choose Library from the Go menu. Navigate to Preferences, and look for the files com.softpress.FreewayPro.plist and com.softpress.FreewayPro.plist.lockfile, followed by anything named Freeway [number, name] Preferences. Delete those, restart your Mac, and see if the problem is gone in your existing document in your usual login.
If you still cannot get through this document without errors, Zip the entire document and either e-mail it (if it’s under 10MB Zipped) or use a file sending service like http://fling.walterdavisstudio.com to send it to support(a)softpress.com for dissection.
Walter
On May 9, 2014, at 5:22 AM, JudithKlinger wrote:
Back to crashing all the time. And what’s even stranger is that I’ve been saving & backing up consistently, but last night’s crash wiped out a weeks worth of work. The last 'registered save" was May 4, the last Time Machine back up was sometime in April. How could that be??
Does everyone else have to trigger a save? If I click on save, I then have to click on a page, which starts the save/pinwheel.
Still crashing this morning, but at least I only lost today’s work.
I’m not a font fiend. I’m not downloading anything…I’ve checked the cache and nothing seems strange.
I"m on Mac OSX 10.9.2, Freeway Pro 6.1.2
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