Images vanished

[Boban]

Dear Mellel Boffins,

I've just opened a file (about 21MB) of a monograph I aimed to send the publisher this morning. All of the music examples, which were PDF exports from Sibelius, have vanished. The rectangles (I'm not sure what to call them, 'holders'?) are still there, but no actual content. Is this a memory issue? It has affected all Mellel files (hence, I think it might be a memory/CPU issue). How can I get it working again?

Ta!

B.

[Boban]

I've tried on my work computer and the images are gone there as well. The frames appear, but the content is gone. This is rather desperate for me. Any tips?!

Best,

B.

[Boban]

Could it be that Mellel no longer sees EPS files? I urgently need some help…

Thank you.

B.

[Boban]

Ok, even after converting the EPS files to PDF they still appear as blank in Mellel.

[Amontillado]

There is more than one flavor of PDF. Maybe there is a conversion that would help.

Both PDF files and EPS are working here. If you could share a link to your pdf and eps files, I'd let you know if they worked here.

[Eyal Redler]

Dear Boban,

This may be more appropriate for a support question. However, one thing you might want to check is that you're running the latest version of Mellel, version 5.1.6. If you're running on macOS 14 (Sonoma) there is a known issue with versions before 5.1.6 and images, an issue that was fixed with 5.1.6.

Otherwise, if the issue persists, please contact our support: choose Help > Support and fill the form.

[Boban]

Here is a link to an EPS file that was working fine until yesterday morning. Mellel and iMac are up to date. Thanks for the help!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4kup7fm0 ... yfaet&dl=0

[Icelander]

Hello Boban,

The EPS file you uploaded is working fine here.

1. Log into your computer with another User Account. If you don't have an other User Account already, then create one. You do that in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Click on the lock to make changes, and then create a new account. This is the way to find out whether your old user account has got corrupted.

2. If the files don't show up in the new account, then ask yourself: Did you perform a system upgrade in the last couple of days? If so, restart from a bootable disk with the pervious system and see if that makes any difference.
I have experienced all kinds of anomalies after a system update, so if you performed a system update the day before yesterday, booting with the old system is certainly worth trying.

[Amontillado]

This is food for thought, not a solution for Mellel.

Curio by Zengobi is sort of a corkboard application. It's my favorite outliner/mind map/concept map tool, and also supports MathJax. That makes Curio a nice math notebook app.

One day, MathJax equations started rendering as empty boxes not unlike the original poster's issue in Mellel.

The cure was to alter how Curio interacted with the MacOS PDFKit. This was done with the very non-Mellel command, 'defaults write com.zengobi.curio "Equation Force Scale Local PDF" -bool yes'. Don't use that command unless you have Curio installed.

Also, you might try booting your Mac in safe mode to see if the behavior is any different. That might suggest some utility is affecting PDF rendering.

Good luck!

[Icelander]

How is it going, Boban?
Please keep us informed if there is any update. Don't vanish too… like the images!

PS
I should have mentioned that I tested your EPS file under High Sierra.

[Boban]

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm just home from a busy weekend travelling/working, but hoping to get back to this issue ASAP.

Best,

B.

[Boban]

No luck. I've tried the suggestions of Safe Boot and creating a new user. I am still missing all the EPS/PDF images.

[Boban]

I suspect that by 'upgrading' to Sonoma, I have lost years of material. It is not the end of the world, but it puts my publishing schedule a solid 6–10 months behind if I have to recreate all the music examples again as PDFs. The bigger problem are things like complete thematic inventories; one of which I have been making for about 15 years, none of it now readable. I just been reading that Apple dropped EPS support after Monterey. I don't know what I can do.

I'm hoping a solution can be found…

Thanks everyone for trying to help.

B.

[Icelander]

I have lost years of material.

That doesn't need to be the case if you have a sound backup strategy.

Why don't you start up from an external bootable disk with an earlier system version on it? If you do that you will see that you have lost nothing. And while running the machine from the external disk, convert the files to a format compatible with Sonoma.

[Boban]

It's a fixable situation, but for longer documents will be time consuming. I found a little file converter (which can do batches) 'PostScriptToPDF' which is working. I did a chapter in about 15 minutes.

B.