Our IT dept. are packaging PsychoPy for us here in Plymouth for lab-wide installation. They’ve made progress but are having the following issue. Is there a known workaround at all to this?
I’ve been working on the software package you requested for PsychoPy and we’ve run into a problem. When loading the software we see a message about not being able to load fonts - we’ve seen this issue before with other products that make use of Python and we usually just take the font files listed and install them for all users on the device. However, in this instance, this fix is not working.
We know that this behaviour is due to a Windows security setting which blocks untrusted fonts (these are fonts that are not located in C:\Windows\Font\) and this is deemed to be a necessary security measure and we’re not in a position to change it.
Todd will take a look at it on the PsychoPy end, if you could tell us a bit more about the particular font issue that you’re seeing. For maximum flexibility PsychoPy does allow the researcher to use fonts packaged in various ways including loading font files that are packaged within the experiment folder or even fetching them automatically form Google Fonts. That’s great for most users but it’s a problem for your uni security then we could surely work out a way that it silently skips if that isn’t permitted.
By the way, you may have seen, but we just released the new “PsychoPy Studio” which is a completely rewritten app using HTML/CSS/Electron rather than the old app which is built using wxPython. Install and startup times are the big win so far, but it will bring lots more advantages long-term (like running in browser with no software install). Studio is the app we’ll be focussing on in future to if you’re just starting on lab-wide installs you might want to try that. Sorry, just thinking that the issues to be solved might be different. We’ll support both apps for a while though.
The Python standalone app does have some fonts packaged inside it, which it registers on launch so it can use them to render e.g. the text in Coder view (which is in JetBrains Mono) without the user having to have that font installed. If the OS is forbidding any app from loading a font from outside the system folder, I can see why it would crash even if the font is installed there too. I think I know what line this would happen on, so I should be able to put it in a try statement and revert to system default fonts if it fails. If your IT department could share the specific error message they get, that would be really helpful as I could then confirm that it’s the line I’m thinking of.
I think PsychoPy Studio shouldn’t have this problem as all of its font handling is done via CSS so it works much the same as if you opened a webpage which had custom fonts in it.
Thanks for the reply. I have passed on your message to our IT people. I’ve suggested that they might consider packaging studio instead. I can see that looks like the future so why not be early adopters
