[Rd] Regression in 4.2.0: unable to type special characters in Windows RGui

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 5/11/22 21:16, Cesko Voeten wrote:
> Hi Tomas,
>
>>>  - Some accents don't work. For instance, pressing 'a produces ã, 
>>> but pressing 'a produces 'a rather than á. From my testing, `^~ seem 
>>> to work as expected, but '" don't.
>>
>> I could reproduce this on the US International keyboard and it is 
>> fixed now. There may be missing support for more accents, so if you 
>> or anyone else find about them, please let me know.
>>
>>>  - Nonexistent deadkey combinations are handled differently from 
>>> native Windows. For example, typing ~^ should output ~^, but 
>>> produces nothing. Typing ~^a should output ~^a, but actually yields 
>>> ~â. So it seems that the first ~ is correctly translated to the 
>>> tilde symbol, but simultaneously the second ^ is being treated as a 
>>> new deadkey press, which other Windows programs don't do in this case.
>> Thanks, fixed now. It was another bug in the old code, plus a 
>> "feature" I added that by pressing e.g. the dead-key apostrophe twice 
>> you get it printed only once (this is what Linux does and I find it 
>> more natural). But I made it now to work as usual on Windows.
>>>  - Related to the above two issues, '& should produce '&, while it 
>>> only gives &. This again affects only '" --- something like ^& 
>>> correctly produces ^&.
>>
>> It should be fixed by now as well.
>>
>> The fixes are in 82332 (R-patched) and 82331 (R-devel). If you could 
>> test again after the snapshot build gets there, that would be great. 
>> It is easy to miss something.
>>
>> When testing now, I've been using http://kbdlayout.info/ as a 
>> reference for several keyboard layouts on Windows, to find how to 
>> type different dead-keys. That can give you also names of the 
>> deadkeys, which can be easily communicated without having to 
>> copy-paste from the Rgui window. On some layouts, additional deadkeys 
>> are available with right Alt (AltGr).
>
> Everything indeed seems fixed on today's R-devel build. I haven't 
> noticed any other behavior that is different from what I was normally 
> expecting on Windows.

Hi Cesko,

>>> Also, I'm noticing only now that selecting typed text in RGui and 
>>> pressing Ctrl deletes that text, so trying to Ctrl+C text that I 
>>> typed is kind of awkward. But this might simply be a feature that I 
>>> wasn't aware of before.
>>
>> Interesting. It isn't happening on my system, but I can't tell 
>> whether it is a "feature" under some circumstances. Maybe you can try 
>> to find out more about this: whether it is repeatable, whether it 
>> depends on some setting, whether it was happening also in R 4.1, etc.
>
> I haven't been able to reproduce this, so this was probably a glitch 
> on my end (PEBKAC?) or a transient issue in R-devel that has been 
> resolved since.
Thanks, so hopefully it is ok.
>
> Thank you for your hard work! Now I'm really looking forward to R 
> 4.2.1 :)

thanks a lot for the testing and the report.

Tomas

>
> Cesko