Ok, I just checked the font of the doc from Text Edit I was imputing. Some of it was a font called menlo — which is strange because Helvetica new is default in Text Edit. I remember Scribus asking if it was ok to substitute for Helvitica Neu. I now changed the to Georgia (my choice for most of the chapters). I still had to paste into Story Editor. I can double click on the text and the cursor work now (btw, I was double clicking before). I can erase that, double click and type new text in. I tried downloading a chapter in get text, it works perfectly, as well. I can even drag and drop in. I went to new document from template in 1.4.6. I couldn't double click on a new text box in it until I pasted the Georgia text into Story Editor again. I'm attaching a blank doc from that Template.
I still don't understand how this behavior migrated over to 1.5.3 when I created a new document at the beginning. I just did this again and it is fine.
Main problem left — I still do not see text in the options in properties in 1.5.3 after clicking or highlighting on the text.
This is a side issue but I'm still a bit concerned about the text. I should explain what all I had to go through to get it. I began with MS Word and had huge amount of corruption and weird behavior. Eventually, I dumped Word. To purify the text, I took a screen shot of each page and used the ocr in Adobe Acrobat to get the text. Some words did not look right, so I retyped them either ahead or behind in the middle of another word and cut the offender. Then I put this text in an online compare document program, Diffnow.com. and compared the text with the original. I corrected the new text there and copy and pasted into Text Edit.
I think that some new corruption may remain in the text from this process as some pretty ordinary words are not being recognized by spell check. Now that the program is working all right with it, should I trust it? Or will it create trouble down the road? I tried attaching a sample .odt but this program will not accept that so converted to .doc