44th studio

Fix Bug on Pencil Export to PNG (and other format)

Pencil is a diagramming tool for creating mockup for application, either it a web application, android, or iOS. I found Pencil so useful, and start to replace yEd, which has been my favourite tool for creating mockups for this late two year. At some point (e.g creating flowchart), yEd still could beat Pencil, but surely not at creating mockups.

But one bug really annoys me since the first day I use Pencil. The export feature to PNG is not working. There are actually two ways to create PNG’s from it, and both successfuly failed! Ahahahaha …

And then I found the workaround for it. The basic problem was, there is no xulrunner installed on my Ubuntu (currently running Ubuntu 13.04), which is used to run some script (or something like it) on the export modules. And the worst part is, xulrunner is not exist on Ubuntu repository!!!! !@#$%^&

So … I found the solution from the web.

First of all, you should install xulrunner from Mozilla ftp site (source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/125980/how-do-i-install-xulrunner-in-12-04). Just run these line on the terminal

FFVER=`grep -Po  ”\d{2}.\d+” /usr/lib/firefox/platform.ini`

ARCH=`uname -p`

XURL= https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/$FFVER/runtimes/xulrunner-$FFVER.en-US.linux-$ARCH.tar.bz2

cd /opt

sudo sh -c “wget -O- $XURL | tar -xj”

sudo ln -s /opt/xulrunner/xulrunner /usr/bin/xulrunner

sudo ln -s /opt/xulrunner/xpcshell /usr/bin/xpcshell

Second, fix line 264 on /usr/share/pencil/content/pencil/common/svgRasterizer.js (source: https://code.google.com/p/evoluspencil/issues/detail?id=526)

persist.saveURI(uri, null, null, null, null, localFile , null ); 

And third, purge cache from previous Pencil instances (this is what I think this command for)

/usr/lib/xulrunner/xulrunner —app /usr/share/pencil/application.ini -purgecaches 

Close Pencil, and start Pencil again normally (from Unity Dash or Menu or whatever you used to click), and try again the export module. Hopefully it works now ^^.