No keyboard access to Edit menu for french users

[phid]

Setting the É character as a keyboard accelerator for the 'Edit' menu, 'Édition' in french, prevents keyboard access to the menu for french-speaking users since uppercase accented characters are formed with a combination of two keys, even on a French, Canadian, Swiss, ... keyboard.

As a general rule, please don't use these accented capitalized in any menu name, just the uppercase base character.

[NathanC]

Welcome to the forums @phid & apologies for the delayed response,

Just to clarify, are you referring to the ALT + Underlined letter shortcut combination to access the different menu options in-app not functioning with the 'Edit' menu due to the presence of the accented character? If so I can replicate this Issue but I'd just like to confirm first.

[phid]

Bonjour,

First, thank you for your reply, and please excuse me for mine being so late, your notification email has been hidden as spam. You got it correctly. I am talking about the Alt + underlined letters combination assigned to a menu that Microsoft calls keyboard accelerators.

I have never used a software appart Affinity Suite presenting the Edit menu in French as "Édition", with É as the shortcut instead of "Edition", E, no accent.

1) É as a shortcut works using the Alt + [ é ] key combination but is disconcerting in regard of the É/é mismatch and is unlike Alt + [ E ] difficult to form with one hand.

2) Windows softwares themselves have always used "Edition", Alt + [ E ], no accent, in their French version. You can run Notepad, Regedit on a French localized Windows system to see it.

3) You can't physically produce this exact Alt + [ actually non-existing É ] key combination on a French / Swiss French keyboard, so I think it must disqualify this shortcut.

4) Moreover, File, Edit and Help menus are the basic main menus in Windows applications templates that have their de facto standard wording and shortcut keys for each language available since a long time ago, and you break an automatism if you change it for a menu of such importance.

So, Edit menu in French -> "Edition", E, no accent. And more generally, no accented capital letter configured as a shortcut in a French menu because it will be impossible to form it in combination with the Alt key. By the way, capitalizing a lowercase accented letter to a capital letter losing the accent is correct in French spelling, even if not recommended in certain cases.

Thank you for your attention.

[NathanC]

Hello,

Many thanks for your detailed response and provided evidence, I have now logged this with the developers for further investigation and correction.

[phid]

Hello,

I applied the last update for Affinity Photo Beta and I could see that my request was taken into account very quickly, I am grateful to you.

But there is a misunderstanding: you changed the keyboard accelerator to "d" ... ? . In addition, I don't know why, but Alt + D does not work, not even for the Document menu.

Repeating myself here, but the standard in Windows for this standard menu, in every French localized software, whether produced by Microsoft or others, has always been VERY SIMPLE:

label:                                       Edition                       NO ACCENT on the E, underlined here due to the action of the Alt key
accelerator :                           E                                   obviously, an unaccented E
resulting key combination :   Alt + E                        the simple, usual, "muscle memory" STANDARD key combination

[phid]

I downloaded your latest update, Affinity Photo Beta, 2.6.0.3078.

1) I complained that Alt + D didn't activate any menus. This was due to a customization I made earlier. So from now I'll test / reset the application with that in mind if necessary. This problem that I created myself, sorry, is actually non-existent / solved.

2) You removed the accent but kept Alt + D / "Edition" / d when the whole point of removing the accent was to establish Alt + E / "Edition" / E as the accelerator ... ?  "Edition" is not optimal since Alt + D cycles between the "Edition" and "Document" menus, requiring the use of the Return, Up or Down arrow keys to unroll them and then another keystroke to activate one of the submenus, Eg. "Rétablir" (Redo) requires: Alt + D, Key(Ret/Up/Down), R instead of just Alt + E, R.

3) The collision/cycling between "Fichier" (File) and "Fenêtre" (Window) is annoying. Since the Alt + N shortcut is not used anywhere in the application, replacing "Fenêtre" with "Fenêtre" would be welcome. This accelerator is a common practice, as anything that interferes with the File and Edit menus should be avoided if possible.

In summary, keeping as much as possible the English-French similarities, the best combinations are:

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "App french translation uses 'Édition' for 'Edit' menu preventing the use of keyboard accelerator" (REF: AF-5607) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.3078). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.