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himself · Apr 26, 2004, 02:44 AM

I hope I'm not the only one experiencing this, but everytime I open the "Keyboard Viewer" from the keyboard input menu item, I'll get the Keyboard Viewer, as normal. But after a few moments, it will disappear, without notice. It won't comeback until I go back up to the menu a re-select it... twice. It's done this ever since I installed Panther, through all of the system updates, and three clean installs (for unrelated issues). I didn't pay much attention to it at first, because I rarely needed it, but I've forgotten some of the old keyboard commands for special characters, so I've been turning to it more often as of late. Any help?

Apfhex · Apr 26, 2004, 03:53 AM

The bug survived 3 cleans installs? That's rough. I can't offer any advice as it works fine for me. It even updates the display auto-magically when I press a key on my USB keyboard or my PowerBook's keyboard.

What kind of hardware do you have?

himself · Apr 26, 2004, 01:06 PM

This is all on a 667TiBook, VGA. I can't remember if Jaguar gave me this problem, but I'm going to grab it off of my Jag Install disks and see if that fixes anything.

CharlesS · Apr 26, 2004, 03:07 PM

The biggest problem with Keyboard Viewer is that Apple hid it so well as to make it nearly impossible for a newbie to find.

Being able to use the option key rather than a character palette to enter umlauts and accents is one of the best things about the Mac, but no one will ever know about it except for the elite...

MartiNZ · Apr 26, 2004, 05:02 PM

Yes, that's somewhat true, but only for the new new users, i.e. starting with Panther, I guess - which is at least something! I also can't understand the secrecy though. I don't even have the keyboard menu extra showing so if I want to see the viewer it is quite a process.

In any case, another thing that I don't understand is that unlike Key Caps in Classic OSes, neither the Panther keyboard viewer nor the <=10.2 key caps display the Symbol font correctly - they show it just like an ordinary font, whereas it quite demonstrably is not! I'm sure there is a simple reason for this, but it would be useful for those of us who don't know things like the Greek alphabet exactly

.

CharlesS · Apr 26, 2004, 07:08 PM

^ That's because of another pet peeve of mine - there's no way to type characters in the Symbol font (or other unusual fonts) via the keyboard in Cocoa apps. Don't believe me? Open TextEdit, select Symbol, and try to type. It'll switch to Times or something else immediately. The reason for this is the way Cocoa handles Unicode fonts. Typing A, B, C, etc. will always get you an A, a B, or a C. If the font you're in doesn't have an A, B, or C in it, then it switches to another font that does. Well, that's a pain in the neck in the case of the Symbol font, in which case you really do have to go to the character palette to enter anything in it. Just to enter a simple alpha. Whereas with a Carbon app, all I have to do is switch to Symbol and type 'a'. Because guess what, alpha really is an 'A' when you think about it!

The thing is, I think there used to be a Symbol keyboard layout that you could switch to in order to quickly enter symbols from the Symbol font, but it's not there in 10.3...

MartiNZ · Apr 26, 2004, 08:11 PM

Wow... that's quite shocking. I didn't know the issue went so deep. That seems like quite an oversight with Cocoa - haven't we all been brought up to believe that it is better than Carbon?

Oh well, at least we can be pretty sure that MS won't be putting the Office Apps into Cocoa for a while, if ever

!

CharlesS · Apr 26, 2004, 09:53 PM

Originally posted by MartiNZ:
Wow... that's quite shocking. I didn't know the issue went so deep. That seems like quite an oversight with Cocoa - haven't we all been brought up to believe that it is better than Carbon?

Oh well, at least we can be pretty sure that MS won't be putting the Office Apps into Cocoa for a while, if ever !

Well, Cocoa's font handling system is much more sophisticated than what is used in Carbon, and its support for Unicode is excellent, but... I would like to be able to type in the Symbol font. I would also like a decent Font menu - no idea why they haven't implemented that.

Oh, and as for the Keyboard Viewer being hidden, in case anyone wonders why I get pissed off about this, watch this movie, and you'll understand:

http://www.dailyillini.com/feb03/feb.../photopoll.mov