How do I change fonts in the keyboard viewer?

You can't. That option is no longer available. All characters are accessible via the Character palette.

So what is the keyboard viewer for then?

So you can find the keyboard shortcuts for special characters. it also allows you to type with no keyboard by clicking the keys in the keyboard viewer. This will become more useful when large touch screens become available,

And how do I take a specific font and see what the keyboard layouts are then?

They should be the same for all fonts.

As I said you no longer can examine the character layout for an individual font. Individual fonts no longer use the same encoding method of the past. All fonts are generated via Unicode encoding. It's no longer possible to have individual font files of 255 characters specified for each font.

The keyboard viewer provides the generic keyboard layout. If you need to locate a special character for input then you have to use the Character Palette.

What an incredible nuisance!
Any suggestions to the following problem:

I want to use the character ≡ (found in character viewer and typed by double-clicking it). How do I find out which key(s) to press to produce it? Keyboard viewer does not show this character - I've tried all modified-key combinations. That I know of....

Help would be greatly appreciated.

bmw

I want to use the character ≡ (found in character viewer and typed by double-clicking it). How do I find out which key(s) to press to produce it?

There isn't one. There aren't enough keys to produce all of the thousands of characters in your fonts. You have to use the Character Palette.

You could assign a shortcut to it via the substitution system in system prefs/language & text/text.

You can! Simply use the 'KeyboardViewer.component' form 10.4 and drop it in System:Library:componentsfolder.
Use keyviewer 1.5 et voila!
Now Apple! Was that so hard?

And for all you out there that raise there hands in aw with every ** Apple does:
Some of us work in desktop publishing and design and we would like see what character to type in fonts like wingdings!