Troubleshooting

Nobody is perfect, and so does FitPlot.
There may be some occasions when the program is not responding as expected and other worst ones where it crashes.
Here some suggestion to solve more of the troubles there may happen with FitPlot.

Symptoms:

The program is very slow (1):

Have you inserted very big files?
Though FitPlot can handle big files, it may happen that working with big images or pdfs requires a large amount of RAM and, whenever there is not enough space in the physical RAM, the system needs to write / read a large amount of data using the hard disk, that is much slower way.
Furthermore, dealing with big images, requires more work for the CPU that is, in the end, more computational time.

Symptoms:

The program is very slow (2):

It may happens when you are dealing with many images / pdf not necessarily as big as in case (1), but very numerous.

Remedy (1 and 2):

FitPlot is able to handle low resolution copy when you are editing / positioning images.
Switch to low resolution preview [editing mode], see preferences panel, preview quality setting, to have a speed improvement in first instance.
If this is not solving the slowness issue, the problem should be caused by intensive use of the hard disk instead of the phisical RAM (insufficient).
Whenever possible, use images at the right resolution for what you want to get.
Ideal resolution for an image to be optimal is 300 dot per inch (while in printing final size).
A good resolution (for images that are seen at a distance, for example) could be set down to 150 dot per inch.
On the other hand, resolutions over 300 or even 400 dpi are useless (for printing quality) but requires more memory (and more time!) to be managed.
A suggestion in such cases, is to make a copy of your big image and resize it into an image editor (Apple© Preview does it well, too) to get a correct size / resolution ratio.

Symptoms:

The program do not start / always crashes.

Remedy:

Probably the preferences file is corrupted and need to be recreated from scratch.

Follow these steps (MacOS 10.7.3 or more):
  • Open the FitPlot container folder in the following way:
    from the Finder menu, press the [shift - command - G] keys combination.
    A dialog appears, copy the following text:
    ~/Library/Containers/
    paste it on the field and press return.
  • Now you are inside the Containers folder.
    Locate the com.pamarcu.fitplot folder. Drag it to your desktop.
  • Now launch FitPlot. All preferences are reset to factory.

About templates and logs folder:
if you were using the FitPlot log utility and you had some templates collected, you can restore them from the old FitPlot container folder that you moved on the desktop (point 2) doing this way:.

  1. Browse through the real container folder to arrive in the folder
    Application Support/com.pamarcu.fitplot
    (you can copy paste the path as in point 1 from the line below):
    ~/Library/Containers/com.pamarcu.fitplot/Data/Library/Application Support/com.pamarcu.fitplot
  2. Starting from the com.pamarcu.fitplot folder on the desktop, browse through the same folders and copy the contents of the folder
    Application Support/com.pamarcu.fitplot
    from the desktop to the corrensponding folder into the library's one.
  3. At the next FitPlot launch you should be able to see again the old templates and log file.

Your contribute… This troubleshooting FAQ is still in progress. You can contribute with your own questions, just use the form at the page footer or the feedback page here. I'll be happy to share the solution to your problems with other FitPlot users.