Monday, December 18, 2006

Macedonian Keyboard Error

Yesterday a poster in the Apple Forums pointed out that the Macedonian keyboard layout supplied by Apple has a mistake in it, where the character з (U+0437) has been replaced by э (U+044D). The uppercase version is OK, however. Also the layout has as deadkey which does not belong there. A corrected keyboard, Macedonianz.keylayout, is available on my iDisk.

I checked the Panther layout and found the same errors. It seems strange I've never seen this reported earlier. Is it possible that before now no one has used OS X to type Macedonian since Panther was released?

5 comments:

Magnus Lewan said...

Strange. But it is not impossible that no one reported it. Apple's bug reporting system is not that accessible, so some of the people who noticed the bug, may not have spent enough time trying to tell Apple about it.

Then there is probably a certain proportion of the users, who never noticed and thought it was some computer version of з. Macedonian does not seem to use э, so there was no risk for misunderstanding.

And then I guess there were those users who noticed it was wrong, but who simply did not care. There are quite a few writers who cannot be bothered to spend time to get things right, when the computer obviously tries to work against them. A high proportion of mails sent in French lack accents, for example, as it is well known by computer users that accents often mess up the text.

Anonymous said...

I wish I'd known about this earlier! I just had a friend proof-read 54 documents I had typed, and she found that error immediately. I'd known about the "kje" dead-key, as it and the ""sh" don't match Macedonian keyboards when you use a Macedonian font.

I tried to download your keyboard layout, but it gets downloaded by Camino as an mpeg movie (i.e., Quicktime mpeg icon)! Any suggestions?

Thanks for your work on this! I really appreciate it, and if I can get your download to work, I will be using your layout to fix those documents later today!

Tom Gewecke said...

The icon should not matter as long as the name and extension of the file are correct. Did you try installing it anyway? If any problems, email me and I will send you a copy that way (tom at bluesky dot org).

kokie said...

That's correct. And only letter э, which is irritating, but also letters ѝ and ѐ are missing.

That's why I posted Keyboard Layout on kokie(dot)wordpress(dot)com.

Tom Gewecke said...

Thanks for pointing out the problem with the two accented characters. It looks like your layout is currently only good for ISO (European) keyboards, so I guess we should make it work with ANSI (US) keyboads as well (which have one less key on the bottom row).