Crash when typing decomposed Unicode characters/diacritics

Bike Outliner
1

When typing Unicode characters with decomposed diacritics, Bike crashes immediately.

For example, a̱ consists of two Unicode code points a and ̱, and requires multiple keystrokes to type. As soon as I type the second character, Bike crashes.

I am able to paste such text into Bike without any problems, so it seems to be related to typing.

2

Thanks for reporting this. Can you tell me exactly how to reproduce it? I’m afraid that I only know English and so am not familiar with many unicode characters/input. Can I reproduce it using an US keyboard and language setting, or do I need to change input method?

On my keyboard I am able to:

  1. Control-i
  2. type e
  3. results in ê

And that seems to work well.

3

Also, can you tell me what version of Bike you are using?

4

You probably need a special input method to reproduce it.

In Unicode, there are sometimes multiple ways to represent a symbol with diacritics or other combining marks (Unicode equivalence - Wikipedia). This is especially true for most Latin characters, because in ASCII these were all one (precomposed) code point. But more recent additions are actually multiple code points, and some are only possible using multiple code points.

The keystrokes you used result in the precomposed ê, which is only one code point ( U+00EA LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX.

It’s also possible to represent using two code points:
e: U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E
̂: U+0302 COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT

Most users in most languages that use a Latin script are probably using the precomposed characters due to historical reasons. There are certain contexts, however, in which one would want to use the decomposed, multiple code points even with a Latin script (such as the stacked diacritics in my other post). Also, there are combinations of symbols in other languages/scripts that don’t have a precomposed option.

I used this keyboard to type the examples in the other post:
https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ipa-sil_keyboard

Using that keyboard, to type the decomposed version of ê (two code points), you would

  1. Type e as normal
  2. Type @
  3. Type ^

Doing so in Bike causes the to immediately crash. I can type it in a different app and paste it into Bike, however.

Also, I’m using version 1.7 Preview (91).

Thanks for your help!

1 Like
5

Thanks for your help. I can reproduce the problem and am looking for a fix now.

1 Like
6

I think this is fixed in latest preview release: