R devel - May 2022 - Regression in 4.2.0: unable to type special characters in Windows RGui

Hi,

Since upgrading to 4.2.0, I can't type special characters in RGui anymore.
Specifically affected are at least "'~^ which, on my US-International
keyboard layout, all rely on dead keys. This was not a problem in R <= 4.1.3,
although I can't say whether the reason is any change in R itself, or the
fact that 4.2.0 is the first version built against ucrt. OS is an up-to-date
Windows 10, language is Dutch. I tried toggling the 'experimental'
Unicode support in Windows's Country & Region settings, but it makes no
difference. Is this a known regression?

Cesko Voeten

On 5/7/22 15:14, Cesko Voeten wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since upgrading to 4.2.0, I can't type special characters in RGui 
> anymore. Specifically affected are at least "'~^ which, on my 
> US-International keyboard layout, all rely on dead keys. This was not 
> a problem in R <= 4.1.3, although I can't say whether the reason is 
> any change in R itself, or the fact that 4.2.0 is the first version 
> built against ucrt. OS is an up-to-date Windows 10, language is Dutch. 
> I tried toggling the 'experimental' Unicode support in
Windows's
> Country & Region settings, but it makes no difference. Is this a known 
> regression?
Thanks, could you please try the latest R-patched snapshot build and 
test it there? If there is still any problem, please report.

I've fixed handling of the dead keys in Rgui/GraphApp last week. It was 
a long standing bug (lack of support) in GraphApp Unicode windows, which 
are used when R is running in a multi-byte locale. As R 4.2 switched to 
UTF-8, this code path started to be used on systems where it wasn't 
before, but sadly this hasn't been discovered by testing before the release.

Technically, there were two bugs: one that dead keys could not be 
printed in non-combining form in principle, and another that some 
accents were not recognized. The former should be fixed fully. For the 
latter, I've added support for a number of accent keys and I can add 
more if needed (and if there is anyone who can test that).

Please test, in principle, there may be also other issues in the Unicode 
windows not reported before, and it would be nice to get these things 
fixed at least for R 4.1.

Thanks
Tomas




>
> Cesko Voeten
>
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