Why is Pages (iWork) periodically not letting my enter text unless I click away from my program to my desktop (or other open program) and then back to Pages?

April 17, 2012 11:54 AM

When using Pages (iWork) on my iMac, every few minutes it locks up and will not let me type anything on the the page. If I click outside of the program (my desktop, or another open program window) then click back to the document, it works again. Why?

It will show the cursor blinking like its ready for text to be entered, but when i type something...nothing happens. I can even move the cursor to a different part of the document and the same thing happens...flashing but no text being written. I click on my desktop then click back to the document window and it works fine. This happens like once every 5 minutes or so. Any suggestions?

posted by slowtree to computers & internet (4 answers total)

This has also happened to me, although definitely not as often as once every five minutes. Maybe more like once every few hours. I always assumed it had something to do with my own personal computer set up, although the fact that you have also experienced that makes me wonder what's actually going on.
posted by high5ths at 12:22 PM on April 17, 2012

Is it autosaving or something? Sometimes my Mac will do this when it's saving, especially to something like Dropbox.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 12:25 PM on April 17, 2012

I'm not sure if its due to autosaving or not. Any suggestions how to figure that out? Is there a way to turn Autosave off? It definitely stays "locked" until I click away and then back again. Even if several minutes have passed.
posted by slowtree at 12:38 PM on April 17, 2012

Are you running Lion? Because if you're not, there's no autosave in Pages. In Lion, Apple introduced a new file saving/versioning concept. It does this at regular intervals. If you're running Lion (and I presume Pages '09 with latest updates) and when that process starts up and it is freezing up you might check your console log to see if it is reporting something wrong happening (Console is found in the utilities folder or by clicking on the Spotlight icon and typing Console). I suspect it is trying to write the autosave/version but it can't for some reason. Mac notebooks actually have an mini-Time Machine hidden on the hard drive where versions are stored. iMacs wouldn't have the enabled by default. You'd need to change settings from the command line to enable it on desktop Macs.

I don't have this problem with any iWork apps, so I don't know exactly where it will show up in the log (but it should show up in the Show All Messages in the top left of the list of different logs). If another app or process is causing the problem it might show up in Console as well.

If you are using iCloud iWork will want to put those documents iCloud. You can turn this off by going to Settings from the Apple menu and selecting iCloud and un-ticking the documents part. Note this may also impact of apps that use the documents syncing/cloud thing as well.

If you don't have Lion, then it you can still check the Console log to see what is happening but it won't be iCloud or autosave/version related. Another utility to check is Activity Monitor to see if the hung app is causing it to freeze).

(Oh and I remember reading on fanboy websites back when iWork 09 came out some warez versions contained a Trojan so if you're not running a legit copy (although at the time it was rare even among pirate copies floating around), it could be that.)
posted by birdherder at 1:16 PM on April 17, 2012 [1 favorite]