PagePlus and Windows 7

Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary,  Sunday,  10th January 2010 - extra page

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TODAY, a cry for help (now solved, see foot of page!)

1. I’ve been busy designing the pages of my book using Serif PagePlus X4.

2. One of my most frequent tasks is resizing a text box.

3. But just one tiny tweak and - on almost every occasion - the box shoots off screen and I have to zoom out to locate it.

A Windows 7 glitch?

I’ve now tried everything I can think of - reinstalling the program, starting the file afresh, reinstalling the previous version of PagePlus - but I still come back to the same problem. I’ve got hundreds of tweaks to make to text boxes during the design process and the problem makes design a slow and frustrating process.

 

The Serif program I use for this website has also developed a text box problem since I started using Windows 7 - it has disabled italic, bold and underline when I’m typing in the box. The old PagePlus X3 had different peculiarities with Windows 7; it doesn’t highlight selected text.

 

Any suggestions would be welcome. Members of the Serif online Forum have been really helpful - my thanks to them - but it seems that no one else has encountered the problem. One suggestion is that my nVidia graphics card driver might be to blame - but it’s not affecting other programs, nor, for that matter is it affecting any other aspect of PagePlus, other than ghost trails that appear when I move a text box. Images don’t seem to be affected at all

 

I’ve spent half the weekend trying to solve it and I guess I’ve now reluctantly got to go back to my ancient version of Macromedia FreeHand or try the free Scribus but I love the ease of use of Serif programs (when they’re working 100% that is!) and I really didn’t want to be starting from scratch with a new program right now.

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Screen Resolution

Here’s an extreme example of the ghost trails that I get when I’m moving images or in this case a text box.

 

I’ve now downloaded the latest 64 bit NVIDIA driver for my graphics card and I can now access italic, bold and underline in this program, WebPlus. Although even that isn’t working entirely predictably as I have to select a word and press the appropriate formatting button before I can use control + i to format and even then it soon ‘forgets’ the keystroke.

 

My screen settings:

1. size of screen 30 x 47.5 cm (56.5 diagonally)

2. 1680 x 1050

3. true colour 32 bit, 60 hertz

 

Conclusion: this seems to be graphics card driver problem. I’ve got rid of the ghosting* by going to the NVIDIA website and selecting a new driver using a simple dialogue.

 

Bonus: my favourite 3D design program, Byrce 6 is fully functioning again!

 

* 23rd January; no, the ghosting and jumping are back again. They went for days but they’re back again now, so the driver wasn’t the only problem.

Useful tip from the Serif Forum; use cursor keys (with control and shift) to resize the text boxes. I like this; very precise. I’ve always been ‘hands-on’ and used the mouse but I’ll use this alternative a lot now.