When I refer to “Character Viewer,” translate that to “Character Palette” if you’re still using Leopard.) It’s only $15, and is the definitive book about fonts in Mac OS X.Turn on the Keyboard and Character Viewers — Mac OS X provides two text-input tools, Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer, to help handle the problems resulting from three issues: not all characters are printed on your keys (where the heck is ©?) most accented characters need to be generated with a special key sequence and many fonts have characters that can’t be typed with any key combination.(Note that among the minor changes from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 Snow Leopard was the renaming of Character Palette to Character Viewer. #1576: Work with image text using TextSniper and Photos Search, upgrade your home Wi-Fi, comparing MagSafe battery packsCharacter entry? Isn’t that what we used to call “typing”? Yes, but how can you type characters that aren’t printed on your keyboard, or aren’t available at all through any key combination? There is of course the venerable PopChar X from Ergonis if you need to insert special characters frequently, but what if you need just the occasional copyright symbol, checkmark, cents sign, or does-not-equal symbol?It turns out that Apple provides some useful character discovery and entry tools, and in this excerpt from “ Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard,” I’ll share what you need to know about one of them: Keyboard Viewer.If you’re interested in Mac OS X’s font handling in general, I hope you’ll take a look at the book, which has 225 pages of details on font history and architecture how fonts work in Mac OS X how to organize fonts how to deal with fonts from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and Apple’s iLife and iWork suites and much more. #1577: iPhone 12/12 Pro repair program, fix corrupted Chrome extensions, iCloud Mail custom domains, Chipolo AirTag alternative, 10-digit dialing changes This command works whether or not you’ve added the Input menu to the menu bar.If you have an Input menu for foreign language keyboards but haven’t put Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer in the menu, the Special Characters command not only opens Character Viewer but also adds both Viewers to the menu.Keyboard Viewer’s Font Menu — Not all evolution is an improvement, and that of the Keyboard Viewer is a case in point. In the Finder, TextEdit, and other programs that strictly follow Apple guidelines, Edit > Special Characters opens Character Viewer. Checking items in the list populates the menu, which includes a shortcut back to the International preference pane.Character Viewer is also available from several other places, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard. In the International preference pane, click the Input Menu button.Check Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer in the list.At the bottom of the window, check Show Input Menu In Menu Bar to add the Input menu to your menu bar. Check Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in Menu Bar to put the Input menu in your menu bar with both items listed.
![]() ![]() Keystrokes Screenshot How To Organize FontsThe best approach, however, is to learn what key combinations produce the characters you use often, and use mnemonics like those in the table below to help remember them.(Note that the key combinations in this table and described elsewhere in this section hold for only the U.S. Many of the Option and Option-Shift characters – especially the ones you’re likely to use often – are easy to remember because some thought went into their placement: there’s often a relationship between at least one of the characters printed on a key and the Option or Option-Shift character.You can check out the entire Option and Option-Shift character sets, and look up characters whose positions you can’t remember, with Keyboard Viewer: open it from the Input menu, and hold down Option or Option-Shift to see the characters those modifiers produce.Click Keyboard Viewer keys, or just type, to enter a displayed character. Unfortunately, Keyboard Viewer is of no help if you’re using a picture font not listed – such as, oh, say that seldom-used, little-known Zapf Dingbats.Snow Leopard’s Keyboard Viewer evolution goes even further: no Font menu at all!Find Option Characters — Since the dawn of the Mac, we’ve been able to access up to four characters from each key on the keyboard: with and without the Shift key, with Option, and with Option-Shift. The screenshot below shows an example of Mac fonts that are so worthy if you have Microsoft Office 2008, the list includes Bookshelf Symbol 7, Marlett, MS Reference Specialty, and MT Extra. By the time Leopard showed up, Keyboard Viewer lost its menu bar Font menu.In Leopard, Keyboard Viewer has a pop-up Font menu (which is more likely short for “font mapping”), with choices limited to Standard, which shows character placement for the currently selected language and a short list of PiFonts – picture fonts – that Mac OS X considers worthy of the label. With all fonts assumed to be Unicode compliant, however, characters should be in the same place no matter what the font. You could enter é in other ways – through Character Viewer, for instance, or with a foreign language keyboard – but why bother when this method is so easy?When you need one of these accents but can’t remember the key combination, Keyboard Viewer can help. The final accented letter is a single character generated from what you typed, so a single backspace erases it.Using dead keys is just a clever way to type characters that are otherwise unavailable from the keyboard. The accents and their key combinations are as follows in this screenshot:To get é, for example, all you have to do is press Option-e for the acute accent and then type e. Press the Option key combination that produces the accent.The dead keys are only half-dead in Mac OS X, so you’ll see the accent in your text, with a squiggly line under it – or some other type of highlighting, depending on the program – to signify that you must type another letter.Accenting is restricted to certain letters – you can’t just put an umlaut on the letter x because you feel like it. The Mac’s dead keys are Option-key combinations, and typing a subsequent letter produces the accented letter: (I explain input keyboards in more detail in “Use Different Keyboards for Foreign Languages or Other Special Input” in the book.) Here’s how to activate the U.S. In keeping with the Unicode lots-of-characters spirit, Mac OS X provides 19 dead-key accents with the special U.S. Extended Keyboard — Roman-based languages use many more accents than the five basic ones that Mac dead keys have always provided. With Keyboard Viewer open, hold down the Option key.Keyboard Viewer highlights the accent keys.With Option down, press one of the accent keys or click it in Keyboard Viewer.The Keyboard Viewer display changes, showing the accent over the letters that can use it.Type (or click) one of the accented letters to enter it.To type an accent by itself, type a space after using the accent’s Option-accent key combination.Type More Accents with the U.S. I added the red circles – Keyboard Viewer is not as enthusiastic about showing you the accented letters.If you keep Keyboard Viewer open while you’re typing, you have the option of clicking its keys to enter the accents and letters: This figure shows the accented letters that can be produced using Option-e. Virtualbox host modules for macExtended this automatically checks U.S., as well.Open Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu.
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