Sunday, January 7, 2018

MacOS Keyboard Language Switching Bug

In MacOS 10.13.2, it appears that you cannot switch directly from Chinese/Japanese/Korean to Cyrillic/Arabic/Hebrew/Greek keyboard layouts.  In order to get the correct results, you must first switch to US or another Latin input source.

It's possible other keyboards are involved, but these are the ones where I have seen complaints and tested myself.

Hopefully this bug will be fixed in a future update.

(Appears to be fixed in 10.13.4)

4 comments:

Paul D. said...

At least the Sierra bug that wouldn't let me switch between English and Japanese more than once without switching applications is gone in High Sierra. (It persisted throughout every version of Sierra.)

And my 'd' key no longer randomly stops working (so far).

Unknown said...

I have a very frustrating keyboard/input language problem on my new MacBook Pro, and I don't know if it is more of a Mac issue or an MS Word issue. On my new MacBook, instead of Command+Space to switch input source, the default is Control+Space (I just changed it because I kept typing the wrong combination). Since my fingers were not accustomed to the combination, apparently I occasionally used Option+Space by mistake, and apparently this was interpreted by MS Word for Mac v15.40 as switching to Arabic. This corrupted the layout of my document because in the middle of a sentence (possibly when I used a browser to look up a foreign-language term in an online dictionary and forgot to change input source back to U.S. English) the direction suddenly switched to R-to-L instead of L-to-R. It did not seem to affect text direction (the English characters I type are still L-to-R) but it affected tabs and use of the arrow keys to move within the line. The most aggravating part was that when I selected any or all of the document and tried to change the language from Arabic to English, nothing changed. I had to sacrifice all of the formatting and layout of the original document, paste the text into TextEdit to remove the language association, and then create a new Word document and reformat everything. I don't know if reverting to the familiar Command+Space option will solve all my problems or not, but I would still be interested in knowing if anyone knows the source of this problem and/or how to solve it. Thank you! - Sarah

Tom Gewecke said...

Sarah -- the best place to ask for help is in the MS Word forum.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_mac

Do you have anything in Tools/Customize Keyboard with Categories set to Tools and Commands set to Language?

Unknown said...

Not that I can see; it looks empty. Thanks for the suggestion, though. I think you helped me in the past with the Lao keyboard layout, so I thought I'd start with a known expert. :) But MS Office problems are often pretty esoteric. I'll try posting there. Thanks!