Can you disable keyboard shortcuts other than the ones listed in preferences to fix keyboard layouts like EURkey not working properly?

[RyanSeo]

I am pretty new to Affinity Publisher 2, but after getting a recommendation from a friend I decided to give it a try and am currently testing out the 30 day trial to see if it works for me.

For the most part, I really like how intuitive the software seems to be, but there is one dealbreaker issue that I have not found a workaround for so far:

(I assume) some of the keyboard shortcuts of the program block essential keyboard shortcuts used in my keyboard layout, making these impossible to use.

To explain in a bit more detail, I write on a iso keyboard, but regularly have to write multilingual texts (usually german or english, occasionally other european languages). The best way to do so for me has been using the EURkey keyboard layout, which maps a bunch of european characters onto the ISO keyboard. While using Affinity Publisher 2, these characters do not get printed and as a result, I have to essentially write and more importantly edit text in external programs and copy it over.

As an example for german, the letters Ä,Ü,Ö as well as ß are all typed by using CTRL + ALT + (A/U/O/S). If you add shift to it, they are printed uppercase. In almost every software I use, this works without issue. The only software I have so far encountered where it doesn't work is Joplin (a notetaking software), which blocks the CTRL+ALT+S keybind. In that software, I could find the keybind in the programs settings, unbind it, and use the software as intended.

Naturally I tried to do something similar in Affinity Publisher 2 by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Shortcuts and looking for any of these keybinds being occupied. I don't find any of these keybinds in there and if I add an already occupied keybinding (for example CTRL+A for select all), I get a warning that this keybind is now double bound, but the same does not happen to the EURkey keybinds, leading me to believe the sofware occupies/blocks these keybinds in some other way that I have yet to find a way to disable.

My question therefore is if there is a way I can regain the ability to use EURkey keyboard layout keybinds in Affinity Publisher 2? Either by unbinding them if they are occupied by some other keybind or by fixing them in some other way?

As it stands, this is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me that would make me decide against buying the software once my trial period is over, which is a shame, because I really like what I have seen so far, but the use of EURkey (or an equivalent other solution that adds the same functionality to Publisher 2) is non negotiable for the type of content I intend to edit.

I am using the Desktop Publisher 2 software on Windows 10.

I thank anyone trying to help for their time.

 

 

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, RyanSeo said:

Naturally I tried to do something similar in Affinity Publisher 2 by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Shortcuts and looking for any of these keybinds being occupied. I don't find any of these keybinds in there and if I add an already occupied keybinding (for example CTRL+A for select all), I get a warning that this keybind is now double bound, but the same does not happen to the EURkey keybinds, leading me to believe the sofware occupies/blocks these keybinds in some other way that I have yet to find a way to disable.

Welcome to the forum!

Did you already looked over all the default by APub setup bind/mapped keyboard shortcuts if there are possible overlaps? - Here are some keyboard shortcuts overviews:

• APub - Keyboard shortcuts  (online help)
• Affinity Publisher 2 Keyboard Shortcuts (Desktop, macOS)
• Affinity Publisher 2 Keyboard Shortcuts (Desktop, Windows)
• A Visual Shortcuts Explorer for all Affinity Tools  (though no EURkey keyboard layout)

Some sources for Affinity shortcut customizations: 

• Customizing keyboard shortcuts  (online help)
• Save Time with Custom Keyboard Shortcuts  (tut video)
• Streamline your Affinity workflow with personalised keyboard shortcuts  (Affinity Spotlight)

A recent thread about a similar theme ...

• Keyboard shortcuts for non-englisch keyboards

 

If APub blocks certain of your EURkey keyboard layout keybindings, you would have probably to reassign all related ones (blocked ones) under the APub keyb preferences. So altering/making certain changes there and then save them for also having some backup. Further it may be useful when using APub to monitor the scancodes it reacts on or not. - Another try worth on Win systems maybe, if the MS Powertoys Keyboard manager utility has here some more impact on remapping certain keyb keys on a lower level. -

Other than that, if you may have a keyboard where each key can be programmed (setup and assigned) directly on into the keyboard itself (on a keyb firmware level), so individually to whatever key scancode you want for sending/mapping, then you can on a deeper hardware level define and influence which scancode certain keys give and are mapped to.

For your initial Q, aka "Can you disable keyboard shortcuts other than the ones listed in preferences to fix keyboard layouts like EURkey not working properly?", APub itself only offers here for keyboard shortcut manipulations what you already have discovered, namely the shortcut customizations under preferences.

[RyanSeo]

First of all, thanks for the quick answer!

I checked the shortcuts, but the only occupied keybind in there is ctrl+shift+alt+s, which is used to export. Since all the others (including ctrl+alt+s) do not work either, I don't think that's where the issue lies.

The first linked shortcut customization option is the menu I looked for when I tried to disable possible double binds, but it seems to be limited to "tools, menu items, panel switch on/off, and tool operations", which isn't the same as entering a specific ascii character as I'd need for my uses.

The closest workaround I found so far has been using the Auto-correct function and adding combinations to get auto corrected to these ascii symbols, but since these corrections only work with words, not with parts of words, it doesn't fix the issue sadly.

Interestingly enough, when I am in the "Auto-correct" menu point and type the correction in there, it manages to read the EURkey inputs just fine and I can type the letters as I would expect, which means the issue is somehow only happening when typing in the actual document.

Using MSPowertoys feels like a bit of a hack that shouldn't be neccessary, but thankfully that partially works, mapping the keyboard shortcuts to the umlauts seems to be recognized by APub2. Sadly it doesn't seem to be able to offer ß as an output, so even this solution isn't perfect.

I still wonder where the issue lies and why I can't fix it, but at least with the workaround of MSPowertoys I seem to have a somewhat functional solution, though possibly not being able to type ß might still be a dealbreaker sadly.

Either way, thank you very much for your time and advice so far!

If this ever gets fixed I'd love the software, for now I'll try it with the powertoys workaround and decide then, but I get the feeling sadly that this issue will be a dealbreaker for me, not being able to type some letters in a language is too much of a disruption for any viable workflow.

Edit: As it turns out MSPowertoys does not fix the issue. It seems to be only able to switch the keybinds of a given keyboard, so while I can assign the umlauts äüö while on a german keyboard layout, once I switch to ISO or EURkey, it just binds to those keys " ; ' [ ". This means the keybind MSPowertoys functionality doesn't work as a workaround either.

Edited April 2, 2023 by RyanSeo
Updated info

[v_kyr]

18 minutes ago, RyanSeo said:

The closest workaround I found so far has been using the Auto-correct function and adding combinations to get auto corrected to these ascii symbols, but since these corrections only work with words, not with parts of words, it doesn't fix the issue sadly.

Interestingly enough, when I am in the "Auto-correct" menu point and type the correction in there, it manages to read the EURkey inputs just fine and I can type the letters as I would expect, which means the issue is somehow only happening when typing in the actual document.

Interesting, did you tried out to disable autocorrection in order to see how it behaves then? - See therefor also this article on Spotlight, maybe it gives the one or other idea how to overcome with this behavior ...

• Discover special characters that make your Affinity Publisher documents shine

... see there the "Preferences -> Auto-Correct panel" and try out what happens when you disable "Replace text while typing", or when you add own "replace -> with" char mappings.

[RyanSeo]

Again, thanks for the quick response. If I disable "Replace text while typing" it doesn't replace them at all (as I would expect).

If I enable it I can use the workaround of replacing ä with ae (which is how it's traditionally written in german if you do not have access to a ä key), but it still only works if ae is its own word, rather than replacing it as I type. As a result instead of typing "Säge", I'd have to type "S ae ", which then becomes "S ä ", delete the two whitespaces, then add "ge" to the end of the word. That's just not a reasonable solution for typing, replacing one keystroke with 10, at least not with how frequent these characters appear in the texts.

Either way all of these seem like workarounds for the actual way I'd want stuff to work, which is the program being able to read the keystroke (as it does in the settings menu). I have tried deleting ALL keyboard shortcuts to see what would happen, and it still doesn't work.

That being said, if I hold the CTRL key I clearly seem to enter some kind of "mode" in which I can see the measurements of items (distances etc.), so my guess is whatever process in the program intercepts that keystroke blocks me from being able to use any keystrokes involving CTRL from my keyboard that aren't explicitly shortcuts in the software itself. If there was a way to disable CTRL toggling that mode that may be worth a try, but I don't know how to do that, nor do I think I saw any relevant option in the preferences menu.

 

[v_kyr]

55 minutes ago, RyanSeo said:

...That's just not a reasonable solution for typing, replacing one keystroke with 10, at least not with how frequent these characters appear in the texts.

It was of course not meant as a solution, instead just to find out if it has has some maybe some impact on the overall strange behavior here.

57 minutes ago, RyanSeo said:

Either way all of these seem like workarounds for the actual way I'd want stuff to work, which is the program being able to read the keystroke (as it does in the settings menu). I have tried deleting ALL keyboard shortcuts to see what would happen, and it still doesn't work.

Yes, these are just in-app customization and workarounds, so to say tryouts, in order to see if there are maybe some strange dependencies and why certain OS system wide layout keyb mappings aren't taken into account here.

1 hour ago, RyanSeo said:

That being said, if I hold the CTRL key I clearly seem to enter some kind of "mode" in which I can see the measurements of items (distances etc.), so my guess is whatever process in the program intercepts that keystroke blocks me from being able to use any keystrokes involving CTRL from my keyboard that aren't explicitly shortcuts in the software itself. If there was a way to disable CTRL toggling that mode that may be worth a try, but I don't know how to do that, nor do I think I saw any relevant option in the preferences menu.

The Affinity apps usually do internally differentiate between personas and function modes if those are active. Certain key combinations (shortcuts) are shared between modes, others are not. - Though if you are in a text input mode (via frame text or artistic text input) I wonder why pressing the CTRL key down should initiate any measurement here when you are in text input mode. - On Apub v1 MacOS where I'am, the measurement feature wasn't avaiable, also when I press Ctrl-e/Ctrl-a inside some Frame text or Artistic text I can move the cursor to the begin/end of a text line.

 

[RyanSeo]

17 hours ago, v_kyr said:

On Apub v1 MacOS where I'am, the measurement feature wasn't avaiable, also when I press Ctrl-e/Ctrl-a inside some Frame text or Artistic text I can move the cursor to the begin/end of a text line.

Interesting, again, thanks for the help so far. The friend who recommended me Affinity products actually has a Publisher 1 licence/version, so I asked him today to test it while screencasting so I could see if the behavior was consistent across versions and it appears to be:

• Typing with EURkey still doesn't work for letters that require keyboard shortcuts such as ctrl+alt+a/o/u/s.
• Holding CTRL down and moving the mouse around makes the same "distance" indicators appear around the text areas, so I assume the same "mode switching"(for lack of a better term) issue is identical across versions, so sadly I couldn't see if this mode switch is what causes the issue.
• He's also on windows, like me.

The only thing that was different across our versions is that he uses a german qwertz keyboard, while I use a ISO (qwerty) one, but since I couldn't physically be there and bring my iso keyboard to test things with his version, using eurkey on the qwertz layout was the best we could do.

Maybe MacOS and Windows have larger differences than I thought, since the ctrl+a/e shortcuts are different on windows (with Ctrl+a natively being "select all").
 

I'm starting to doubt that I will find a solution to this problem, which is a bit of a shame, but I truly do appreciate all the effort you have put into helping me find a solution.
Would you happen to know if this kind of issue would justify making a bugreport? On the one hand I assume it's unintended behavior on behalf of the program, which would be an argument to make a bug report, on the other hand it seems like a nieche issue and putting resources towards fixing compatibility with a keyboard layout like EURkey is probably not worth it from a business standpoint, assuming it's not a trivial fix (and even then it'd be a low priority bug at best).

Edited April 3, 2023 by RyanSeo

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, RyanSeo said:

Maybe MacOS and Windows have larger differences than I thought, since the ctrl+a/e shortcuts are different on windows (with Ctrl+a natively being "select all").

Maybe, Ctrl-a (start of line) and Ctrl-e (end of line) are modeled here after common Emacs keybindings, as most Unix shells (bash etc.) support too that way. - You can ask in the "Publisher 2 Bugs found on Windows" forum section after keyboard layout mappings on Win systems and why those aren't taken into account here. Since only those are probably monitored by the APub developers and those should can tell how they deal with keyboard layouts and keyboard shortcuts (on which level, if taking OS settings into account, or if bypassing those and polling own C/C++ key type functions instead).

[RyanSeo]

Well, thank you very much again for all the help so far, I'll do that.

[RyanSeo]

Minor update:

As it turns out, using AltGr (the right sided alt key) the keybinds work, making me suspect the mode toggled by CTRL is actually the cause.

I have opened a bugreport ticket [here]. In the meantime, using the right hand alt key is a less than ideal, but acceptable solution.

Just wanted to share in the unlikely case someone stumbles upon this thread with the same issue at some point.

[v_kyr]

Good catch! - Which BTW might then probably here also behave the same way for the other V2 apps (APh, ADe) then.