MathType and Mac OS 8.5 bug affects international keyboard layouts

David Deutsch has discovered a problem with MathType (versions 3.1 and 3.6) and non-US keyboard layouts, on some Macs, under Mac OS 8.5.x. For example, on his G3 Series PowerBook, certain MathType keyboard equivalents of menu commands (such as Command-C for Copy or Command-W for Close) do not work. The application beeps when they are invoked. However, the problem does not occur on his PowerMac 9500/180MP.

He contacted MathType's Technical Support and received this reply: "We have had a number of users report this problem, however, we don't know what is causing this problem. We did have a user who was using an international keyboard setting change to the U.S. keyboard setting (and recently we learned that Finnish works also) and the problem seems to go away. This seems to be a bug in OS 8.5 because OS 8.1 users were not experiencing this problem. In addition, we discovered that turning off the virtual memory under control panel/memory also seems to circumvent this problem." David tried switching to the U.S. keyboard layout. It worked.

[Note: See previous item for a report on another MathType issue.]