Mac Option-<key> shortcuts don't work in editor

[Vince Rice]

Calibre on OSX. This has existed since I started using Calibre early in 2.x, and persists through the current version, 3.40.1 as of this writing. It has also lasted through at least three major OSX (10.x) releases, including the current 10.14 Mojave, and all of the various minor releases of those major ones.

The Mac has a number of Option-based (Alt on a Windows keyboard) shortcut keys to type in commonly used special characters.

For example, Option-; for an ellipsis (…), Option-2 for a trademark symbol (™), Option-3 for a pound symbol (£), and so forth. There are also a few to add diacritics, e.g. Option-e will add an accent to the next typed character (Option-e e results in é).

All of these work in the Calibre Book editor, EXCEPT "Option-;". Instead of resulting in an ellipsis, you just get a semi-colon.

However, it *does* work in the Find/Replace input fields. IOW, while editing a file, Option-; just results in a semi-colon. However, Cmd-F to get to the Find input box, and there Option-; results in an ellipsis like it should. Same for the Replace input box.

So something in the editor proper appears to be eating the Option in Option-;.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Fixed in branch master. The fix will be in the next release. calibre is usually released every alternate Friday.

 status fixreleased