EURkey keyboard layout not working with Affinity Publisher 2

[RyanSeo]

I use a ANSI (qwerty) keyboard, but type in multiple languages, most of which are european, so I use the EURkey keyboard layout by Steffen Brüntjen to type the language specific letters occasionally needed. As an example to type the german Umlauts (ä,ü,ö) you would use the keybind "CTRL+ALT+A/U/O" or "AltGr + A/U/O".

In Affinity Publisher 2, when typing in a Text Frame or Artistic Text Frame, the same keybinds with "CTRL+ALT" do not produce the desired characters, instead no input is read by the program. Using "AltGr" does produce the desired characters in the Text Frames.

Interestingly if I go to Edit -> Preferences -> Auto-Correct and type in the "Replace" or "With" input fields, the program behaves as expected with both input methods, meaning that it can read the inputs normally.

The problem can repeatedly be reproduced on new files.

Technical details:

• Windows 10 Home 64 bit, Version 21H1 OS build 19043.1526
• Ryzen 5 5600X processor
• 16 GB RAM
• Radeon RX 6800 XT Graphics card
• Issue persists with and without hardware acceleration enabled
• No relevant background software that may intercept the keystrokes other than the OS

Recipe:

• Have ANSI (qwerty) Keyboard (Issue supposedly appears on other keyboards too)
• Have EURkey keyboard layout installed and selected
• Open Affinity Publisher 2
• Create new Project
• Create a text or artistitc text frame
• Type in it
• Try to insert special characters with the CTRL+ALT+Character binding
   

Unverified personal assumtions regarding the issue:

The only other program where I have seen similar behavior in the past was in Joplin, a notetaking software. In there the issue existed because the keybindings were already preoccupied by the program, and had to be unbound in the settings. After unbinding it worked as intended. Since in Affinity Publisher 2 only one of the relevant keybindings seems to be preoccupied with another keybind ( CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S for export), this solution does not work here.

However my assumption is that the program somehow blocks the keybind because it reads some of the input. Since using AltGr keybinds works, my assumption is that the issue is the using of the CTRL key on the keyboard to switch into the mode in which you can see the distances of text fields to their surroundings (for lack of a more specific term).

A "fix" could consist of either making it so that the keybinds work on EURKey again (evaluating how realistic that is is beyond my technical skills), or giving us the option to bind this control mode in the settings to some other key, which might also work.

I'm of course willing to elaborate should further information help on my part.

I know this is a bit of a nieche issue, but it seems like unwanted behavior and as such it should qualify as a bug. I asked about possible ways to fix it in the Support & Questions part of the forums and was advised to specify it as a bugreport.

Thank you for your time.

[stokerg]

Hi @RyanSeo,

On 4/4/2023 at 1:41 AM, RyanSeo said:

Since in Affinity Publisher 2 only one of the relevant keybindings seems to be preoccupied with another keybind ( CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S for export), this solution does not work here.

I believe we also use Ctrl+Alt+C and Ctrl+Alt+L for Text Alignment, which also likely stops this from working, so be worth checking you've cleared those in Affinity.  I've tried to directly test this myself today but having a bit of trouble getting everything working for some reason, i'll try again on my office PC.  If it still doesn't work, i can get this logged with the Developers  

[RyanSeo]

On 4/6/2023 at 12:57 PM, stokerg said:

I believe we also use Ctrl+Alt+C and Ctrl+Alt+L for Text Alignment, which also likely stops this from working, so be worth checking you've cleared those in Affinity.

I haven't in the software setup I am using right now, but I did disable/unbind all shortcuts when testing things out, simply to minimize possible points of failure when testing stuff before reporting this bug/unwanted behavior. Whatever causes it, all the keybinds that can usually be triggered with CTRL+ALT as a substitute for AltGr are blocked by it.

On 4/6/2023 at 12:57 PM, stokerg said:

I've tried to directly test this myself today but having a bit of trouble getting everything working for some reason, i'll try again on my office PC.  If it still doesn't work, i can get this logged with the Developers  

Thank you for getting back to me and trying, I didn't read it until today due to easter, but I do appreciate it. If you do manage to replicate it logging it with the devs (maybe as low to mid priority) might be worth it. I personally think using AltGr instead of CTRL+ALT is suboptimal, but it's good enough to get work done.

The main concern is that I don't think this is limited to the (admittedly relatively rare) EURkey keyboard layout.

As an example I thought if the substitution of CTRL+ALT would not work for other preinstalled keyboard layouts, and the issue is the same here. With the german qwertz keyboard layout that is most commonly used there, the "@" is typed as AltGr+Q and the € sign as AltGr+E. Almost every german I have ever seen uses CTRL+ALT instead of AltGr though. Neither of these keybinds work in Affinity publisher 2 with the normal german qwertz keyboard layout (when I try it at least), so I fear this issue might affect a larger portion of the userbase than just those using somewhat rarer layouts.

Other than that, let me just say thank you very much again for the response.