Can't display ê, ó etc in predictive text in iPad

Keyman
#1

I have made a keyboard and Lexical Model and installed them on my iPad. The keyboard and predictive text work, but non-English characters don’t display. Here are the details:

It’s the same keyboard and Lexical Model package that I described in my post at
community.software.sil.org/t/predictive-text-not-appearing/6501, namely for the Rossel Island language (YLE) of Papua New Guinea.

It’s an iPad Air (3rd generation), running IOS 15.5. Here’s a photo of text that I have been able to type with the on-screen keyboard (but not the clip-on physical keyboard. I’ll do an issue about that.). You’ll see that the special characters appear nicely, but the predictive words have question marks in them instead of characters like “â”.

2022_07_27 18_29 iPad predictive-rot
2022_07_27 18_29 iPad predictive-rot1920×1393 156 KB

Is there a way to fix this?

#2

This might be a format issue for your tsv file. Could you see what format and line endings you have? I looked at about 10 in the repo and they were all UTF-8 with DOS line-endings. Some of them had a BOM and some didn’t.

#3

Sadly, iOS does not allow us to support external keyboards (we could do it inside the Keyman app, but not when using Keyman as a system keyboard, so that’s of limited value). This is a limitation of iOS.

The lexical model .tsv file must be in UTF-8 format, and should not have a BOM (although the compiler will accept one). This topic describes the format in detail.