Hi. I maintain the Shaw Imperial and Shaw QWERTY keyboards. Over the last month or so I’ve found the keyboards have become almost unusable on iOS due to the keyboard regularly and randomly freezing. I’ve attached a screenshot of it actually frozen. If I change keyboards and delete a few characters, then I can go back and type in Keyman again but if I try the same combination of characters (type the same word) the problem recurs. I’ve been unable to discern any pattern in what will trigger the freeze. It often happens with tough-and-hold keys but is not restricted to that. It should be easy to reproduce since it happens a lot. I tried turning off predictive text using the Shavian lexical mode but this made no difference, and am using the latest version of Keyman through TestFlight (17.0.100-alpha) but it was happening with the release version as well.
As of today I’m using iOS 16.4.1(a). I’ve had the same problem on my iPhone 11 and my iPad Pro 2nd generation. EDIT: I have allow full access on.
Happy to provide any further details that may help.
Can you provide some additional info to help us reproduce the issue?
Does the freeze happen soon, or after typing long paragraphs?
Do you see this typing in several different apps?
I just tested it. It happened across all the apps I tried (Mail, Keyman itself, Discord) and it seems to be certain combinations of characters. For example if I try to type 𐑣𐑬 𐑤𐑪𐑙 [how long] as the only text at the start of a field it seemed always to freeze on the 𐑙. But I could type the same combination here in a longer block of text, strangely. It’s also not just this letter or combination but I haven’t been able to discern a pattern.
I’m wondering if it is connected with Shavian being in a higher Unicode plane made up of surrogate pairs. That is often an issue in other apps.
Anyway, I realise Shavian shouldn’t be a priority compared with under-served languages but thought it worth mentioning if it points to other issues that might come up.
EDIT: Further testing reveals that it doesn’t matter what Shavian letter follows 𐑣𐑬 𐑤𐑪, the next letter will freeze.
Thanks for the extra detail – that really helps us in trying to figure out the cause of the issue. I have tried to reproduce the issue here but so far without success – as in, “it just works”, which is not terribly helpful!
The symptoms you are experiencing are consistent with a Javascript error occurring within the keyboard or KeymanWeb itself – can you reproduce this issue on https://keymanweb.com/#en-shaw,Keyboard_english_shavian_igc on your phone – I have tried to repro here too without any luck.
The problem doesn’t occur if I use the online keyboard on either my phone or iPad. I haven’t heard a lot of reports of other people experiencing this so it’s a bit mysterious. It happens with the installed Keyman keyboard on both my iPad and iPhone though, with the same character combinations causing the keyboard to freeze.
Okay, so I think I’ve found the source of the problem, even if I don’t fully understand why.
Changing the following in the touch keyboard layout json file for Shavian IGC from:
"id": "U_10450",
"text": "𐑐"
to
"id": "U_10450",
"text": ""
seems to fix the problem. At some point I’m guessing the Shavian letter is being interpreted as a surrogate pair rather than a single Unicode code point. And for some reason in iOS 16 this is causing a problem. (The problem emerged around the same time as the iOS16.4.1 update, so I’m guessing here).
In my second keyboard Shavian QWERTY (yet to be fixed), the problem is even more explicit — for some reason the ‘text’ field is represented with surrogate pairs. This wasn’t a deliberate choice - I was using Keyman Developer (v10, I think) rather than looking at the raw code:
"id": "U_10450",
"text": "\uD801\uDC50"
It appears that either way, this breaks my keyboard in iOS16. Surrogate pairs usually seem to be the problem.
In my own testing with Shavian IGC, the problem was resolved by simply deleting the information in the ‘text’ field where the ‘id’ field already gives the Unicode point. I’m submitted a pull request for Shavian IGC to confirm this works in a release version. I’ll update Shavian QWERTY once confirmed.
