User to enter characters with diacrical marks using Keyboard

[lewis]

Returned to LiveCode after several years. Cannot find how to enter special characters in fields.
I seem to recall that one used to be able to use Alt+nnnn - e.g. Alt+0233 for é as I have just done here.
But this is not working in LiveCode 8 fields. Is there a simple way to do this?

[lewis]

The ability to input special characters (e.g. those with diacritical symbols such as é) into fields in LiveCode seems no longer to exist. It has been suggested that this is a bug as it was possible prior to Version 7 and subsequent versions. Can anyone confirm this?

[jmburnod]

Hi Lewis,
I never met issues to enter a diacritical char in a field.
Do you can precise what is happens when you type a diacritical char ?
Best regards
Jean-Marc

[lewis]

To enter, for example an e acute here in this message I can just type Alt+0233 with the result é as shown. However when I perform these exact same actions in a field in LiveCode there is no resultant input. I am running Windows 10 and in MSWord and in Notepad I can input e acute in exactly the same way as I have indicated in this message. But as I have said this does not work in a LiveCode field when I am running LiveCode 8.
I seem to remember that I could do this previously prior to LiveCode 7.

[AxWald]

Hi,

can confirm that it works in 6.7.10. Hold Alt, type 0233, release ALT -> é

Have fun!

[SparkOut]

That is the OP's point. Prior to version 7 it was working. I have just tested on Windows 10 with LC 9.0 dp3 and it doesn't.

[richmond62]

If one wants to enter a letter with a diacritical mark on Macintosh or Linux one chooses
a (non-English) keyboard mapping and types the letter in:

I wonder why this should be any different in Windows.

[lewis]

I really want to achieve these special characters from within Livecode rather than from whatever the operating system provides. I have written some code to achieve this which I think may prove more convenient than having to remember or look up the altChar codes.

I created two fields listing all the upper and lower case alternative characters that I could need from aA to zZ e.g. "a à á â ã ä å" and "A À Á Â Ã Ä Å"... "d ð đ ď ɗ ɖ" and "D Ð Ď Ɗ" ... "z ź ż ž" and "Z Ź Ż Ž" and use them as variables altchars-lower and altchars-upper.

By setting the insertion point in the input field after the relevant ordinary character and trapping the optionKeyDown message I then use the selectedChunk function to obtain that character and check whether it is upper or lower case and whether it is in the appropriate list altchars-lower or altchars-upper. If it is I get the lineOffset of the character and I can then cycle that character through that line of alternative characters with their diacritical marks. It works well for my purpose. (Which is for a personal library database where author names such as 'Per Wahlöö' and 'John le Carré' occur quite often.)

If anyone is interested I can post the code. It is fairly amateur and I don't know how important the choice of text font is with all these Unicode characters for the whole thing to work seamlessly. I just ensure my fields use Lucida Sans Unicode font.

However as Sparkout noted in his/her reply the use of the optionKey or altKey as it is in Windows with numeric codes still doesn't work.

Prior to version 7 it was working. I have just tested on Windows 10 with LC 9.0 dp3 and it doesn't.

This also makes it harder to insert symbols such as © and · . So is it a bug or not and if so does someone know how to raise the issue.

[SparkOut]

You can report it here http://quality.livecode.com/

(SparkOut is a he, btw)

[richmond62]

Keezer.livecode.zip

Here's the stack.

(22.2 KiB) Downloaded 235 times