Free Text is designed to keep you out of trouble, but sometimes the unexpected happens. If you get stuck, or see a message about a ΓÇ£...fatal error...ΓÇ¥ of some sort, you should quit from HyperCard, immediately *reboot* your Macintosh, and then look around. Did you run out of disk space while building an index? (That is the commonest kind of error.) Did you try to reindex a changed database file without first discarding the old indices? Do you have anything unusual about your system that might have caused a bad interaction with Free Text? Were you trying to index or browse a file that was already open, such as one of the Free Text stacks itself?
After a crash, especially while index-building, you may be left with a large number of temporary index files on your disk, with strange names: ΓÇ£z0k0ΓÇ¥, ΓÇ£z2p17ΓÇ¥, etc. It may take the Finder a long time to even open the folder where your index-building was taking place. Be patient, and trash all such files before trying to build any further indices. (You can use the Free Text ΓÇ£Delete FilesΓÇ¥ button to get rid of them if you like.)
