I’ve been working on a project for about four days and all my progress seems to have been lost because my screen is flooded with “unexpected element” errors and the file fails to load. This is the only forum topic I was able to find that addresses these errors, but I was unable to learn how to deal with them.
I am using the newest dev version of Synfig: 1.1.10. I tried opening the file in 1.0.2 and encountered the same problem.
Please let me know what I can do, up to and including hex-editing the file to get back on track. I was going to use this animation in a major presentation on Monday… Parallel wires 2.sifz (48.2 KB)
I’ve repaired your work, but I can’t save it back to sifz because I don’t have a development version of Synfig installed on my PC and 1.0.2 will probably screw up some things during differences between versions. So, I attached a sif file in zip archive, unpack it and you’re good to go.
Sadly, Synfig can mess up internal XML structures while saving sometimes and nobody knows why. So always backup your work. I usually work with 4 files, say Project1.sifz…Project4.sifz and cyclically save between them every time I make some progress. It goes like this: did I hit CTRL+S 5 times already? Then I need to save my work to a different file. This way you can always go back if there’s a catastrophe. Parallel wires 2.zip (67.5 KB)
Thank you so much! I’ve looked over the repaired animation and it looks great! I’m really glad the information was all there. I will be sure to keep multiple save files handy from now on.
By the way, for future reference, how did you edit the file? I tried opening it in a text editor but (unsurprisingly) got garbage. Is there a program that’s well-suited for debugging faulty Synfig files?
when you open the faulty file, there are references to the lines in the sif file.
First you need to extract it (7Zip), the open it in a text editor where you can see line numbers.
In your case, it was “ArrowHead” Layers which were faulty:
containing <width_point></width_point> instead of
Between, it was missing <lower_bound> and <upper_bound> elements too.
Maybe you did a copy-paste between files of different version or maybe there is somewhere in the code a “forgotten” modification (who knows )
Try to stick to one version of Synfig and thanks to Svarov for his reactivity
(btw after repair it makes my 1.1.10 crash but 1.0.2 can still open it )
Here’s a quick update on my animation. It was for a job interview for a teaching position and I finished it Sunday evening. I believe it impressed the committee because I got the job!
I’d like to extend my tremendous and heartfelt thanks to Svarov and BobSynfig for helping fix the file and explaining what had gone wrong. I like Synfig for what it is (when it’s working properly…) but what I especially love about it is the active and growing community it has. You guys are the best!
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