Subject: Metal vs non-ascii chars on Mac
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 09:44:22 -0800
x-sender: ###@###.###
From: Jens Alfke <###@###.###>
To: "Tom Ball" <Thomas.Ball@Eng>, "Amy Fowler" <amy.fowler@Eng>, "Chris Ryan" <chris.ryan@Eng>
Cc: "Jeremy Daggett" <Jeremy.Daggett@Eng>, "Steve McGrath" <###@###.###>, "Pete Steinauer" <###@###.###>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Tom, Amy, Jeremy:

One of our developers in Denmark has been bugging me about an issue that
I think is purely Swing/Metal related; I can't find any decent workaround
in MRJ. So I'm dumping it on you. (He has sent it to the general Swing
feedback address but also begged me to use my (ahem) influence with the
Swing team to make it better known...)

The problem in a nutshell is that, in certain Mac OS international
keyboard layouts, it is necessary to use the Option (aka Alt) key to type
some regular ascii characters -- the example he gave is "~" which I
believe is Option-"`" on the Danish keyboard.

However, Metal interprets all Alt-modified keystrokes as shortcuts, so
when a "~" is typed it will be sucked up as a potential shortcut and not
entered into text. This makes it impossible to type this character in a
Metal based UI.

I should note that the problem also occurs, in a slightly lesser form,
even with US keyboard layouts -- in _any_ Mac keyboard layout many
non-ascii characters like "ø" (o with a slash, if this message gets MIME
mangled) or "¢" (cents) use Option (Option-O and Option-4 respectively)
and are thus non-typable in Metal. Other such characters include bullets
and fi/ff/fl ligatures -- the kinds of things people in publishing use
daily.

[I'm not sure whether this issue applies to MSWindoes as well, because
frankly despite a year of NT purgatory I was _never_ able to figure out
how to type a non-ascii character. Thank you, Microsoft.]

I've already engaged in a bit of religous saber-rattling with Chris Ryan
over Metal's insistence on using the Option/Alt key -- you guys are
obviously going to have a different opinion than us on whether
consistency between platforms is more or less important than consistency
with other apps on the same platform. But the bare facts are that this
decision has to some degree, depending on their nationality, crippled the
keyboards of Mac users.

Any ideas?

--Jens

PS: If you want to talk to this developer directly, his name is Mads
Freek Petersen, ###@###.###

SAP need the fix for their SAP GUI for Java ASAP.
The product is shipping and the customers have trouble