I downloaded the trial for Scrivener on my Mac. I got started pretty successfully, and created a new project. I imported some pictures and made some notecards, basic stuff. I didn’t load any extra stuff or plugins or anything. I went away from the project for a while but it’s NaNoWriMo so I wanted to resurrect it.When I tried to launch it today the program became totally unresponsive. Here are the exact systems:
Launch Scrivener
Project Templates screen appears. If I choose “Open Recent” and select my project, the Template window disappears and nothing happens.
If I choose “Open an Existing File”, it goes to my Documents folder and I can select my story from there. I select Open and again the main window disappears and nothing happens. I’m left with the Scrivener menu and no content. At that point I cannot quit out of Scrivener or launch any other menus. My only option is to force quit.
Has anyone seen this/have any suggestions? I would uninstall and reinstall it but I’m not certain about whether it will cause me to lose my data by doing so. I’m also a little disappointed that I’ve used this very little (27 days left on my trial) and am already having difficulties. I’m not even doing anything crazy with it!
Console.log in the Scrivener support folder has a bunch of entries like:
2012-11-03 13:17:10.264 Scrivener[1795:207] Could not find image named “random_image_name”
2012-11-03 13:17:10.330 Scrivener[1795:207] Cannot lock focus on image <NSImage 0x18084310 Size={0, 0} Reps=(
)>, because it is size zero.
Any suggestions? If not, if I uninstall Scrivener will it delete what I’ve created, or will my project still be there? If I can’t get Scrivener to work again, is my data lost since I assume the file type is proprietary?
Reinstalling the software will likely not help you with this problem. It looks to me as though one of the graphics that you imported was invalid and is reporting itself as being zero bytes long, which is in turn confusing the display engine. It’s likely this document is the one you were viewing last, so every time you try and open the project it crashes the software. So one way to approach this would be to find the project in Finder, right click on it, and choose Compress to make a quick zipped back-up. You should see a .zip file appear beside it. If for whatever reason you need to return to the project at the state it is in right now, you can just delete or move the current copy away from that folder and then double-click the .zip file to get a fresh copy.
Okay, now right-click on the project and choose to show package contents. In the Settings folder, delete the ui.plist file. Close that window that popped up, and try double-clicking on the project to open it. If it opens successfully, then you know it’s a local problem with one individual document—the one with the bad graphic. If you click around amongst all of the text documents and folders, the program should eventually crash again and then you’ll know which one it is. Write down the name of it, and let me know when you get that far.
I did as suggested and made a zipped copy, and then looked into the package contents and removed ui.plist. I tried to open the file again and Scrivener opened it seemed (i.e. the application menu came up across the top of the display) but I got no window at all.
I then closed Scrivener again (Force Quit) and launched the application first, and then tried to open my project. Same thing. I guess it’s clear that my project is messed up somehow, but I’m a bit disheartened. I haven’t done anything particularly exciting or challenging with the program, and it seems my simple project is causing issues.
Based on your previous post, I may go through and see if moving the images I imported out of the Docs folder in the project to see if it opens then.
As an update, I removed all jpegs from Scrivener and tried to launch my project again. This time it freezes at the screen that says “Scrivener is unregistered!”. I click the Try button as before and it freezes. Again, if I launch the application first, I get the window that lets me choose the file and then it freezes from there.
It could be an image inside of an RTF file that is messing things up as well, so just clearing out the bare JPEG files might not do the trick. However it sounds to me as though the problem is perhaps a bit deeper than that. Clearing the ui.plist should have at least let you see the project window. When a project has its UI info completely reset it loads with all folders collapsed and nothing loaded in the editor. It’s a “safe mode” if you will. At this point none of the project data from the Files/Docs folder is even loaded into RAM at all. So since that didn’t work, it’s probably another issue.
Have you tried reinstalling yet? I would do that, and reset your preferences as well. Remove the com.literatureandlatte.scrivener2* files from ~/Library/Preferences, and move the ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener folder to a temporary location (don’t delete it, you might want to salvage stuff from there such as any saved templates, backups and so forth). Then delete the software, empty the trash, log out and back in, and then install and run the software again. The first thing I would do have doing that is create a new blank project. Make sure that works, and then turn off the option in General that reopens projects you’ve left open (that way you can avoid getting in a crash-on-launch cycle) and try opening the one that crashes.
If you still get a crash, would you be okay sending us a copy of the project for analysis? If that’s okay, send it to mac.support AT literatureandlatte DOT com, or if it is larger than 10mb, contact us to set up a Dropbox share.