[open] Font module issue when opening on a Mac

Starr

Our experiment runs fine on PC, when when we try to open it on a Mac running the latest OS we get this error:

Error: OpenExp error
Description: Failed to call openexp._canvas.legacy.init_display()

Error: font module not available (ImportError: dlopen(/Users/[username]/Desktop/opensesame/opensesame.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload/pygame/font.so, 2): Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib Referenced from: /Users/[username]/Desktop/opensesame/opensesame.app/Contents/Frameworks/SDL_ttf.framework/Versions/A/SDL_ttf Reason: image not found)

We aren't using any unusual fonts, not sure what's happening here.

Daniel

Hi Starr,
It could be that you have a newer version of libfreetype installed, which OpenSesame can't find as it is looking for the older version. Normally all dylibs in mac are symlinked to with a version agnostic link like libfreetype.dylib (note the missing 6), but python programs in generel have the habit to hardlink to the file they reference.

A possible fix might be as follows. Look into the /usr/X11/lib folder to see if you can find any files with the format libfreetyp.X.dylib (such as libfreetype.7.dylib). If so, create a symlink to this file with the name libfreetype.6.dylib, with the following command in your terminal:

sudo ln -s /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.X.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib
(replace X with the number you find)
This is a really hacky (and hopefully temporary) fix which reroutes requests for the libfreetype.6.dylib to the newer version. I don't know how much has changed between versions and if the newer versions are backward compatible, and I haven't tried this out myself, so I have no guarantees that this is a working solution.