Comment 12 for bug 167290

Originator: NO

A test on latest SVN with OS X 10.4.9 reveals that ALT is working as
expected for all the shortcuts it is mapped to (clone, unlink clone, menu
shortcuts, etc. all work). There is no interference with the APPLE key now,
no matter if "Enable keyboard shortcuts under X11" is checked or not in X11
preferences.
The problem remaining is that many special characters are typed by
pressing a character key+ALT. For example on a US keyboard, ALT+a is œ,
ALT+s is ß etc. On French keyboard this is even more of a problem because
many useful special characters surch as \ or | are mapped to some SHIFT+ALT
combinations. All those characters cannot be typed in the Text tool because
ALT is stolen for keyboard shortcuts (ALT+D clones instead of typing ð for
example). This occurs bothnon canvas and in the Text tab of the Text and
Font dialog.

Is this still an OS X specific problem? It looks that this probably occurs
on all systems.

What can be done? Could ALT be supressed as a modifier when using the text
tool? This will probably break things a bit (i.e. one will not be able to
clone a text without switching to the selector tool). Could ALT be anabled
as a way to type special characters in the Text tab of the Text and Font
dialog at least?