[Scribus] Bug report: Disappearing text in text frames

[rmunn at pobox.com]

Greetings,

First, thank you to the Scribus developers for a very useful piece of
open-source software. Unfortunately, I'm running into an annoying bug
that's making Scribus rather difficult for me to use right now. When I
create a text frame and type in it, I can see the text as I type. But as
soon as I hit the Backspace key to correct any mistakes, the entire text
vanishes. But when I start typing again, the entire text re-appears.

Hitting Backspace isn't the only way for me to make the text disappear.
It also disappears when I click outside the text frame. I can select the
frame, and its border appears as a red dashed line, with grab handles to
resize it. I can resize the frame, and it resizes just fine -- but still
the text inside is invisible. The only way for me to actually see what's
inside the text frame is to click on the "Edit Contents of Frame" tool
and actually add at least one character to the text, at which point the
entire text reappears. If I delete one character, or highlight part of
the text (whether with the cursor or the mouse), the entire text
disappears again.

This is purely a display problem: the actual characters are not being
lost. But the only way that I can see the text is to either add a
character, or else work inside the Story Editor tool. This is making it
almost impossible to use Scribus productively, as I can't rearrange text
frames on the page and see how they're going to look.

I'm running the Gentoo distribution of Linux; I compiled Scribus from
source with Gentoo's portage utility. Versions of Scribus and the other
packages that it depends on (at least according to Gentoo's list of
dependencies):

scribus-1.1.6
zlib-1.2.1
qt-3.3.2
libart_lgpl-2.3.16
lcms-1.12
freetype-2.1.5

Have you seen this problem before? Is there any other information you'd
like me to provide?

P.S. I would report this on the Scribus Bug Tracker, but
http://scribus.bradney.info/ gives me a 404 Not Found error: "The
requested URL / was not found on this server."

-- 
Robin Munn
rmunn at pobox.com