Now that the new Java version of Arachnophilia has been available for a while, I have seen certain problems reported again and again. Here is a list of the most common ones.
If you have downloaded and installed the correct Java runtime engine from http://java.sun.com , and you can't seem to run Arachnophilia, open a command window (Linux: shell console), move to the place where the file "Arachnophilia.jar" is located, and type:
java -jar Arachnophilia.jarThis launch method has the advantage that you can read any errors that may appear during launch.
This launch command is what is invoked by the default Windows program icon, and it is the appropriate way to launch Arachnophilia on other platforms. Linux users can create a batch file containing this command, or use one of the various desktop-environment launching methods.
If, after successfully running Arachnophilia, you find that you cannot run it any more, you have the option of editing the configuration files located in the directory (user home directory)/.Arachnophilia, or, the simplest approach, just delete that directory. If you delete the directory and run Arachnophilia, the program will re-install itself with a fresh set of configuration files.
Most kinds of program errors are trapped and logged in the file (user home directory)/.Arachnophilia/Aracherrorlog.txt. If you have difficulty launching Arachnophilia, reading this log file should be the first step.
The main help pages cover browser location and installation, this section covers a few problems that may come up on some systems, or with some browsers.
The default launch argument is "file:$1". During the launch procedure, the token "$1" is replaced with a temporary file name that contains the Web page to be viewed. Some browsers may not accept this specific launch string. In that event, you can change the launch string and your changes will be remembered.It is important to realize that the same browser can be launched using different launch properties. Simply create a new browser profile, type in the same program path, and change the options.
This feature tries to synchronize the browser preview with the editing position in long documents. But it has one flaw -- the document marker might end up in the middle of a script segment and cause runtime errors in that script, for a page with <script></script> blocks. In such a case, simply disable the "Jump to doc position" feature.
You may want to create a toolbar button for each browser, to save time previewing and comparing browser behaviors. This is easy -- the macro "[LaunchBrowser]" accepts an optional argument. To launch a browser you have named "MyFavorite" in the browser configuration dialog, use this macro argument:
[LaunchBrowser:MyFavorite]
The search & replace panel contains a very easy way to search for things, but it should not be used for every kind of search. If you want to search for a very long string, or provide a very long replacement string, use macros instread of typing them directly into the search & replace panel.To make this easier, the search & replace panel text entry windows can be right-clicked and a list of user macros is displayed. So type your long entry into a macro, then enter the macro name into search & replace.
Also, macros can be written for specific searches, this formalizes the search process and makes it easy to collect your favorite searches as a set of toolbar buttons.
Some people have tried pasting the entire text of "War & Peace" into the search text window. This will have a very bad effect, distorting Arachnophilia's display entirely. One solution is to press the "clear" button in the extended search & replace panel. But in truly pathological cases, to recover the display, simply delete the (user home directory)/.Arachnophilia directory, and let Arachnophilia reinstall itself.
There is a small memory display at the lower right of Arachnophilia's display. Please do not take this display too seriously. Its display of memory usage isn't quite what it appears to be. Technically, it shows recovered or free memory, but unrecovered free memory is not included, so the situation is nearly always better than the display indicates.You can always click the display to force Java to recover memory, but even this doesn't always make the display show the true amount of available memory. It's just a handy status indicator, like a barometer that, although generally useful, rarely tells the truth.
There is a subtle aspect of the FTP service that has caused some problems. The user-provided remote path should be "anchored," that is, it should be a full path beginning either with "/" or "~", depending on the requirements of your service.For example, if you know that the path to your Web pages is understood by your service's FTP service as "wwwdocs", be sure to enter this as:
/wwwdocs
or:
~/wwwdocs
but not as:
wwwdocs
If the latter example is entered, it creates a very annoying result -- a series of directories is created in the wrong place, because the FTP protocol interprets each new change-directory command as an addition to the last, rather than a lateral movement as intended. To summarize, this produces any number of useless directories in the wrong place.