kword freezes when text is entered
 

I have two Slackware machine with the same problem. When text is entered in kword or kpresenter, the wysiwyg part of the window freezes. When I try to close the window nothing happens for several seconds and then an error box opens saying that kword is not responding.

One machine is kde 3.4.1, koffice 1.4.0a
2nd machine is kde 3.4.2, koffice 1.4.1

Other applications like kivio work

Linux is great but not perfect. It could be a bug in your packages. You could try re-installing or upgrading the appropriate packages.

A way to get further information is to start the app from a terminal window. Error messages may be left on the screen after the app closes.

Have you tried OpenOffice or AbiWord?

Problem solved by changing from default bitstream sans vers font to anything else before any text entry. Strangely I can revert to bitstream font later without problems.

OO and Abiword always worked OK

Hmm, not fixed, I can enter numbers, punctuation characters but get an instant freeze with letters, both lower and upper case.

As the probem only affects letters could this be something to do with a spell checker? Font rendering and kerning should equally apply to all printable characters?

Problem solved.
I found that with a clean install of Slackware 10.2 kword worked, so I made a careful comparisson between installed packages and found aspell_en was at 6.0.0 on 10.2 and only 0.51 on my broken machines
Upgraded the package and all is well.

It was the spell checker

Glad you worked it out. It is amazing how some huge problem may be caused by a small detail.

Yesterday, I had one of my 200gB hard drives become unreadable. Fortunately it was part of a RAID 1 array and a reboot got me back on the air. I found out a CDRW drive that shared the cable did not share very well. I am back with redundancy. This thing has been running 24/7 since January.

I had a similar issue. Kword would just quit out with an error. It turns out I had a dropline aspell package installed. Removed that, seems to work great now.

Hmm. Dropline doesn't have an Aspell package. :)

Kword recently started linking to a few libraries that we have to update in GNOME though, like libgsf. If you intend to use KDE and a third-party GNOME, you may want to carefully check a few of the dependencies. It's very hard to make both just work unless you're building them together.

The only reason I was using dropline was to get evolution working. I have a handful of gnome packages for that. I'm pretty sure the aspell package was part of Dropline, otherwise it would have updated along with the rest of swaret.

We have gtkspell and gnome-spell, but no aspell.