painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

[hemal.pandya]

My daughter needed "something like MS WordPad" and after a bit of searching it seemed like AbiWord was the best choice, even though it is Gnome thing (I believe).

But when I type something in AbiWord it leaves some underscore like characters, see the attached abiword-dirty.png. This junk vanishes when the window is repainted, e.g. by minimizing and restoring the window, see abiword-clean.png.

I could probably live with it, but my eight year old can't. Can someone please suggest how to fix this? Alternatively, is there anything else she can use? The functionality I am looking for is primarily setting font size and style.

Thanks in advance.

[Snowhog]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

What version of Kubuntu are you running, and, what graphics card do you have?

[hemal.pandya]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

Thanks for the quick response.

What version of Kubuntu are you running, and, what graphics card do you have?

How do I find these out? I installed Kubuntu a couple of months back.

[Snowhog]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

Open a console and type:

lsb_release -c

If you have this package installed, you will get an output like this:

Codename: intrepid

(The above is from my system, running Intrepid, which is version 8.10)

As to your graphics card, while still in the console, type:

lspci | grep Graphics

(Best to just copy the above and paste it into the console)
You'll get an output like this:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

(Again, the above is from my system)

[hemal.pandya]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

This is what I get:

dualcore:~$ lsb_release -c
Codename: jaunty

dualcore:~$ lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

[askrieger]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

I wonder why you have your daughter using Abiword. I would have thought that the text editor, most closely approximating M$ WordPad(tm) would have been KATE, but I haven't used windoze in many years and so, I really don't know what WordPad does now.

Kate is a fairly straightforward graphical text editor for KDE. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but you can use the mouse to select things to drag and drop. It has spell-checking for a goodly number of languages. You can use "snippets", although you need to store them in an auxiliary file that you have to open separately (Somebody correct me if there's an easier way.). You can use it as a programming editor with syntax checking for a reasonable selection of computer languages ranging from HTML to asm.

The only thing that Kate isn't, is a word processor. For that, I use OpenOffice.

[hemal.pandya]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

....

First time I am hearing about Kate. My daughter doesn't need snippets and she doesn't need syntax checking (yet...I hope :-). She just needs to set the font bloody size.

I will check out Kate and hopefully it will serve my (daughter's) purpose. Many thanks.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

I don't believe KATE allows you to manipulate font size, other than to resize the whole thing.
You might look at kjots , which you will probably need to install from the repositories.
Pretty close to wordpad, with a few extra features.

[hemal.pandya]

Re: painting issue with AbiWord in Kubuntu

Thank you doctordruidphd. I'll check kjots.

I have also been pointed at Google Docs, which seems to be a good choice :-)