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Mac Special Characters
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There are bunch of symbols that can be created using keyboard shortcuts as I mentioned on my previous article : 100 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Creating Symbols. Unfortunately, not all of available symbols on your Mac can be called out with keystrokes. That's when Character Palette comes in handy here.
Character Palette
For all applications which are specially designed to run on Mac OS X, you can open the Character Palette. There are two ways to open it : navigating through the Flag or accessing via Edit Menu; The latter is easier.
The Flag is located on the right side of your menu bar. If you cannot see the Flag, you should activate it first from your International Preferences Pane (the bottom check box inside Input Menu tab). After you've got the Flag, you can click on it, choose Show Keyboard Viewer and your Character Palette will appear. You can refer back here to get to know more about Input Menu.
When you're inside any of Mac OS X applications, you can invoke Character Palette by choosing your Menu Bar ▸ Edit ▸ Special Characters. This is so much easier than the method before. If you want to boost your speed further, you can use keystrokes Command-T.
Now you've been successfully move inside Character Palette.
Inside Character Palette : Searching Specific Symbol
I've bad news here, your Character Palette will be floating above all of your applications, distracting you from your work. But the good news is, you can access most of the special characters available with your Character Palette. And more, searching for specific character is really easy, fast and addicting.
Let's say you want to search for your horoscope sign Virgo (it's my horoscope sign, after all). Click on the search box on the bottom right corner of your palette and type in "virgo", the result is very straightforward.
Let's try another more universal example. You can type "heart" and all the characters whose name contains the word "heart" will be displayed as the result.
You've found your very special character, but you cannot put it directly on your website (or maybe.. blogsite). Don't worry about that, you can find the unicode right away.
Find the Character : Get the Unicode
Look at the top of your Character Palette. There will be option box labelled View which you can set your Palette display there. To get the unicode, you should choose Code Tables. You will get your character "virgo" is located at row "2640" column "D". It means that you need to use "&#x" plus "264D" to get the character displayed correctly on web browser.
If you're not sure enough, you can see the full details of your character by clicking on the left triangle of Character Info which will display your character in large size, its name, unicode and its UTF8 code.
Lastly, don't ever forget to click Insert..
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11 Comments
Dominik MJ
Help - I am using MacOsX Leopard - I am also sure that I used the special characters before on this system; but now it doesn't open up again! Any thoughts? Thanks in advance! Dominik MJ
Francesco C.
@Dominik: Try looking at this: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1257002&tstart=50 Best Francesco
henning andersen
i have access to a wealth of characters and diacritics, but need special combinations. unfortunately, combining diacritics show up as non-combining or as a blasnk square. what can i do?
henning andersen
i have access to a wealth of characters and diacritics, but need special combinations. unfortunately, combining diacritics show up as non-combining or as a blank square. what can i do?
Chris
I can't stop the Characters box from being open on the screen everytime I open my computer. Even from standby. Any ideas?
Michael
If there are any special characters you use a lot, you can map them to a key or key sequence using ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict, which you may have to create. Look up the details on the web. I put them in sets. ^i is for phonetic symbols (IPA), e.g., ^i^e is schwa. ^id is ð. ^io is the short o in my dialect (low back rounded), etc. ^m^a is the Cmd symbol. ^m^o is the option symbol, etc. ^s^a is alpha. ^s2 is squared. ^sc is a check mark. These symbols don't show up on this forum. You can also use this file to define other keyboard shortcuts. Next I'll experiment with replacing those regular option characters I don't need, such as the Spanish and Portuguese characters. I don't know why Apple put the fi and fl ligatures in Shift-Option, since they are generated automatically. The accented capital letters can be built with the accent keys.
A
You can download an app called Symbol Caddy, which sits on your dashboard. It's a tiny little thing, but you can find the codes for a ton of symbols.
Sam
Hey there, Im just looking at the pictures... but does the menu/menubars have a rounded gradient on them?? Is that a system thing?? Or is it a photoshop job?
Jon
How do I get rid of my special characters icon from my menu bar?
coleen
thank you, this was very helpful!! :) kudos!
coleen
thank you, this was very helpful!! :) kudos!
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