[open] Plugin error on Mac OS

Hansika

Hello,

I've been trying to use the multiple_choice and text_screen plugins, (opensesame v0.26, Mac OS (10.6.8)) but every time I complete programming the experiment, my file disappears. The error that pops up is

Description: Error: Script error

Description: Failed load plugin 'text_screen'

It's happened for the third time now, and I can't find any faults in the script itself.
This is the structure:

experiment

   text_screen

   loop

     sequence

        multiple choice

        logger

    end

Also, the first time it didn't work, it showed an error with loading the multiple_choice plugin. I tried the same structure on a PC and it's working fine. I've tried reinstalling opensesame too; but to no avail.

Would appreciate some help

Hansika

sebastiaan

Hi Hansika,

Just so we're on the same page, you mean the text_display plug-in, right? Or do you use a custom plug-in called text_screen?

At any rate, I think the problem that you're seeing is a bug in the Mac OS version where newlines aren't dealt with properly. This has been reported before, here and here. Because of this bug, all items where you enter multiline text, such as the text_display plug-in or the inline_script item, cause trouble, at least on some versions of Mac OS.

The status on this (serious) bug is that I hope (pending testing) it has been resolved in 0.27. But since there are no Mac OS pre-release packages available, this is not very useful for you (yet!).

So you'll have to find a workaround. Probably the easiest solution would be to simply use a sketchpad item, and present the text this way. If it's a lot of text, you can for example create a bitmap in a drawing program and insert it as an image into the sketchpad?

I'm sorry that I cannot offer a real solution at this point! But I assure you that this particular bug is noted, and we will do our best to resolve it.

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

theorhodes

I have this problem in the latest version of the mac binaries (0.27.1). It's very clear in the actual script (how I recovered my experiments after they failed to open) that the line breaks are what's causing the issue, though in one instance it used content and end with the block of text on separate lines between them, but this also caused the script to not be recognized. Sketchpad worked just fine, but there was definitely a moment of panic when the experiments didn't open.

If you find yourself with this problem and unable to open your experiment, you can recover your experiment by opening the .tar.gz and loading the script.opensesame file directly and resaving it. You may need to reimport pool items.

sebastiaan

Hi Theo,

The newline issue should be resolved in the 0.27.2 Mac OS package (but not 0.27.1). There's only a 32 bit build available at the moment, but it might be worth trying out. If you encounter similar problems with the latest build, please let us know.

And I'm glad to hear you managed to recover your experiment. Indeed, you can always open your experiment in a tool such as 7zip to recover your script manually, even if OpenSesame fails to open it.

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

Plc4MieHaed

I've just had this problem and neither trying 0.27.2 nor opening the script.opensesame file has worked, I'm still getting the error.
Any ideas? Losing my experiment would be a disaster!

Description: Error: Script error
Description: Failed load plugin 'text_display'

Chris.

sebastiaan

Hi Chris,

Without more information I cannot say what causes the error, but I would first try to see if you can open the experiment on a Windows machine. If this also fails, you could upload the experiment somewhere and post the link here so that we can see what's wrong. My bet is that your experiment is fine, but that for some reason the text_display plug-in fails to load (you could try this in a new experiment).

At any rate, don't despair! The chance that your experiment is lost is very small, because you can always recover your experiment script using the method described above.

Cheers!
Sebastiaan

Plc4MieHaed

Thanks for the reply. Luckily I had a version of the experiment from only 2 days before I got the error, and although it was a little time consuming I just went back to that one. Now I keep backups!