Keystroke "4" on a Mac french keyboard

Hi, for some reason I don't seem to be able to use keystroke "4" as an input, on a french Mac keyboard (I'm not talking about the keypad, but the keyboard's first row). Other keys from that row work OK. Needless to say, that key works outside BMT. Any idea ?

[EDIT] It actually works if I switch to the US keyboard. Is there a way to circumvent this behaviour and not to have to switch keyboard every time I use BMT ?

Anyone ? There must be a way. Thanks !

OK I found the solution by comparing US and french keyboards and using the french equivalent to the US key as my input. I found out BMT acts strange with foreign keyboards, for some non US keys accepting them, for some others not. On which criteria ? That is to be determined

Hi mocker

Sorry for the delay, I had a family emergency over the weekend.

I'm going to pass this on to Florian, since I have a feeling this goes deeper than a work around would allow. He should, hopefully, be able to get you an answer soon.

Thanks
Jared

Hi mocker,

unfortunately, it is rather difficult to cover all scenarios. They way keystroke emulation and keystroke input works in MT is to base it on the actual keys on the keyboard. So any SHIFT'ed keys will not work as input. You'd need to capture the SHIFT key in one translator and the key with "4" (which is unshifted the ' key) in another.

Now to ease interoperability, MT tries to apply some logic so that the letter keys are always the same, no matter which international keyboard is selected. For other keys, that's not as easy. So it's best to always use unshifted keys in the incoming keystroke action. For non-letter keys, it will not always work well on other international keyboards though. But it should work on the keyboard which you used to record that incoming action.

We plan to add a "letter" or "key character" input/output action, where you type the letter produced by a key. So if you type "4" in there, it will always trigger whenever the user "creates" a 4, no matter what is necessary to do that: as examples, an English keyboard 4 key, in French the ' key with SHIFT, and on all keyboards the number pad 4). That action type won't let you distinguish keys typed on the number pad vs. regular keyboard, because it's letter based and not key based.

Hope that explains some... I know it's a bit abstract.
Regards,
Florian

OK thanks Florian, I get the picture. As I said, I could fix it by typing the ' produced by another key (US keyboard) and that let me use the 4 key as my input. Hope that makes sense