[Pythonmac-SIG] Fix for international characters in Tcl/Tk 8.5

[Ned Deily]

Good news for users of IDLE and other Tkinter-based applications!  A fix 
for Cocoa Tcl/Tk 8.5 for improved handling of Mac OS X input methods was 
recently applied and has now been released in the latest ActiveState Tcl 
release (8.5.11.1) available here:

    http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/downloads

It appears to fix a number of long standing problems with Cocoa Tcl/Tk 
8.5 involving composite characters, like the French keyboard tilde 
(Option-N) problem and  the inability to enter Option-U + vowel to form 
"umlauted" vowels on US keyboards.  Entering these characters in IDLE, 
for instance, used to immediately crash Tcl and, hence, Python and IDLE.   
In fact, the Apple-supplied Tcl 8.5.9 in OS X 10.7 Lion exhibits this 
behavior (try it with /usr/bin/idle).  (The Apple-supplied TCL 8.5 in OS 
X 10.6 Snow Leopard is so buggy as to be essentially unusable with 
IDLE.)  Many thanks to Adrian Robert, Kevin Walzer, and the ActiveState 
team for addressing this nasty problem.

If you install ActiveState Tcl 8.5.x, it will automatically be used by 
the python.org 2.7.x, 3.2.x, and 3.3.x 64-bit/32-bit Pythons for OS X 
10.6 and 10.7.  It will *not* be used by the Apple-supplied system 
Pythons nor by 32-bit-only python.org Pythons.   More details here:

    http://www.python.org/download/mac/tcltk/

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org