443622 - Spell Catcher's auto fill macros are not working correctly

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 442660

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect)

Description

[Steve Sweitzer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0

I'm using SpellCatcher X which has a macro feature that allows you to type a few letters followed by a space or tab and the letters you typed are erases and the field is filled in with a predefined text string - for example, I type "g1 space" and my gmail address is filled in. 
This is working very intermittently - sometimes nothing happens but most often, I get "[e-mail] [e-mail]" 



Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.type key combination "g1 space"
2.get [e-mail] [e-mail] 
Actual Results:  
[e-mail] [e-mail] 

Expected Results:  
[e-mail]

I checked with Rainmaker and this is what they say:
The specific problem here, and why you observe this somewhat unpredictable behavior, is caused by two different bugs:

1. Firefox "eats" the tab key (at least, perhaps other control keys as well), handling it in such a way that input methods never get to see it. This is a real problem because tab is considered a word separator, and is used by Spell Catcher to trigger various interactive features and behavior. Preventing an input method from handling *any* keystroke is seriously frowned-upon.

2. Firefox does not pass mouse events through to input methods. There are two ways mouse events should be handled as far as an input method is concerned. One is for editing in any open inline input area (Spell Catcher does not "do" inline input), the other is to signal to the input method that the selection has changed, and it needs to finalize whatever needs to be done due to this. Spell Catcher uses both to reset the state of interactive checking. Because Spell Catcher doesn't get notified of mouse events, typing appears to "run-together" whenever you click to change the insertion point or edited text area, then begin typing again.

These two bugs cannot be worked around on the input method side. The application must be fixed so that it conforms to general Mac OS X text input guidelines.
--------------------
Evan Gross
(Spell Catcher 8 & X author)

Comment 1

[Russ Carlson]

I have been experiencing this problem with Firefox 3, using Spell Catcher X 10.2.3.  Until this release, it always worked fine.  When triggered, the Spell Catcher shorthand expands to include the trigger, the expansion, and then the expansion repeated and underlined.  It sometimes also shows non-Western characters.  

This same behavior occurs in Filemaker Pro 9 Advanced, so I’d like to know whatever fix works, so they can also be notified.

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

This is essentially the same thing that's reported in bug 442660 (which needs to be broken up properly into two or more bugs).