Tip: You will ♡ Apple’s Character Palette
Did you know you can type a snowman ☃, and a phone ☏? How about musical symbols liks ��, ��, ��, ��, and ��?
Apple’s Character Palette lets you type interesting characters like these without straining your memory.
Here’s how to open the Character Palette:
1. Open System Preferences and click on the International icon.
2. Click on the Input Menu panel (the one on the right), then make sure both Show input menu in menu bar (bottom-left corner) and Character Palette (first item in the list) are checked.
3. Close System Preferences. You should now see a new flag icon up in your menu bar, near Spotlight in the upper-right corner.
4. Choose Show Character Palette from the menu. If you have a lot of fonts, it may take some time for the Character Palette to appear the first time.
The Character Palette groups characters into various categories like Geometrical ◕, Arrows ➠, Mathematical ∛, and Currency ₤.
When you see character you’re looking for, just double-click it to insert it into your document.
There’s a lot more to the Character Palette, including a powerful search feature, detail panels for character info and variations. You can designate favorites, too.
Once you give it a try, you’ll appreciate not having to remember how to type those characters—just open the Character Palette!
I love Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer.
I just wonder at the limits of using obscure characters found in the Character Palette in webpages and email. How do these characters appear on non-Macs?
The most useful feature is favorites designation. When you find a character you want to use, hit the (whatever the hell that geary thing is) button and choose “add to favorites.” This way, you will build a palette just of characters you have used, which are likely to be those you will use again.
When I tried this I wasn’t getting the flag icon. I opened the international preference pane, went to input menu, and noticed that at the bottom left of the pane was a box entitled “Show input menu in menu bar.” I selected it and closed the pane. Immediately, the flag icon appeared.
Warning: if you have a lot of fonts, calling up the character palette may take some time.
Good additions, Don. I’ve updated the post to mention the additional checkbox to show the menu i the first place (!), and added a cautionary note about it taking a while if you have a lot of fonts.
Curmudgeon Geographer asked:
“I just wonder at the limits of using obscure characters found in the Character Palette in webpages and email. How do these characters appear on non-Macs?”
The answer is, it depends. Some of the characters are shortcuts for Unicode characters, and should be “universal”. Some are font specific. and some, it just depends on the app.
By way of example, viewing this page in Firefox, Safari and IE 7 on Windows all yields completely different results. Firefox, not Safari, actually does the best job, showing most of the special characters properly (but not all of them).
The point is, this is a great tip for printing or personal use, but don’t expect the characters to appear properly if you’re sharing them with other platforms.
“…don’t expect the characters to appear properly if you’re sharing them with other platforms.”
Or computers of the same platform, based upon fonts installed and enabled. The way to resolve that is by making text a graphic image or saving as PDF.
I love the character palette and use it all the time, but in Firefox whenever I try to use the ♥ (black heart suit) it only shows up as a vertical straight line, and the ♡ (white heart suit) shows up as an X’d box–a bigger version of ☒ (ballot box with ‘x’)–whenever I insert them into text.
Initially I thought this might be just a bad interface with LiveJournal, but subsequently I’ve found this happens when I use them in email–and just now, this has occurred when inserting them in this text box, and in the overall text on this page as well (though the white heart suit shows up in the window title fine, it reverts to the x’d box version in the text herein).
Dare I hope this might be fixed in Firefox 3?