Mac user getting an error on the tutorial

[Free Time Machine]

If this has been asked before, sorry!

Hi all! I just recently discovered RP and I'm trying it out now. I'm trying to learn by following along with the tutorial. But, no matter what, I seem to be getting the same error message. Could this be a Mac thing? The text editor I am using is TextEdit. By the way, TextEdit doesn't launch when I choose "Edit Script" from the Launcher. It will launch, however, to tell me what errors I've been having.

I attached the errors.txt file. I tried going with a different tutorial... but it's the same message.

Thanks!
FTMachine

[PyTom]

Hm... for some reason, your text editor is not emitting the correct line ending character. It's using carriage-return instead of linefeed, so everything is showing up on one line.

Could one of our mac users suggest how to change that?

[Wintermoon]

Isn't it the parsers responsibility to recognize all valid unicode line endings? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Unicode.)

[Free Time Machine]

Thanks PyTom. I had the feeling the problem had something to do with the way the text was encoded and not with how I was inputting it, but I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint it myself.

I was able to use that insight to look into the problem on my own a little bit further. It appears that Ren'Py recognizes customary Windows line breaking, but not what's standard for the Mac. The best way for a user to get around this at the moment is probably to change the line break method of the .rpy file using the text editor itself.

TextEdit, the built in text editor for the Mac, doesn't appear to have this feature. So today I went hunting and found a good freeware text editor for the Mac with a lot of features specifically geared towards coding. Using the editor I was able to change the break character from CR to CRLF. (I also turned on automatically adding LF to the end of a document if there is none; I don't know whether or not this was necessary to solve the problem.) Now it works!

I'd just like to say that I'm very grateful this program has Mac support at all. A lot of people feel that the returns on Mac compatibility aren't high enough to warrant the effort, so I appreciate this. Until the problem can be resolved within Ren'Py, it would probably be best to mention this workaround somewhere within the documentation Wiki.

One more thing: an ability to specify which text editor opens from the Ren'Py launcher would make for very cool feature in a future release!

Thanks again! -FTMachine

PS: I found the good editor here: http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
(It's Mac-only, though )

[PyTom]

The thing is, on my machine, TextEdit sticks in newlines. IIRC, Apple switched to the unix-style line endings when OS X came out.

[Free Time Machine]

Wait, I'm running OS X. What's that mean? *is now more confused than ever*

[PyTom]

Yeah, that's what I'm finding weird. Which version of OS X are you using?

[Free Time Machine]

10.4.6. But it's the Power PC variety, not the new Intel kind.

[Free Time Machine]

What's more, converting to Mac/Unix-style endings did not fix the problem for me. Converting to Windows-style endings fixed it. I don't know if that helps at all...

[rocket]

I just had the same problem last night....

It's *not* Text Edit's fault.

It's copy and paste from the web sample (in my case from Firefox) to any text editor (I had the same problem using BBEdit which shows EOL chars and really had me pulling my hair out).

Type away in Text Edit and you'll be fine. But really, there are better editors.

[PyTom]

Also, 6.3.1 should be a bit more resistant to this sort of thing.