What happened to the kana palette?

Question

Level 2

288 points

What happened to the kana palette?

Two things are bothering me with Snow Leopard:

1. What happened to the kana palette that you could add to the input menu? It makes it impossible to type half-sized kana in Japanese for certain sounds.

2. If you use a font such as Wingdings, which doesn’t use traditional mapping, how do you get it to appear in the keyboard viewer? In 10.5, a drop-down menu was attached to it that allowed you to see the mapping of these fonts.

Help is appreciated! Peace.

2.4 gHz Intel MBP; 1.42 gHz PPC Mac mini G4 DVD±RW, Mac OS X (10.6.2), 4 gb RAM, 7200-rpm hard drive, 256 Mb VRAM; 1 gb RAM, 32 Mb VRAM

Posted on Mar 1, 2010 2:53 PM

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Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Mar 1, 2010 3:10 PM in response to MuzikJunky

Under Character Viewer, there's a katakana palette. That's probably what you're looking for.

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Mar 1, 2010 4:00 PM in response to MuzikJunky

1. What happened to the kana palette that you could add to the input menu? It makes it impossible to type half-sized kana in Japanese for certain sounds.

The kana palette was deleted in 10.6. It has never been essential to typing anything as far as I know. There are kotoeri codes for all necessary characters. You can find a chart in the Kotoeri Help or here:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/kotoericodes.jpg

If there is something specific you think cannot be made that way, let me know.

2. If you use a font such as Wingdings, which doesn’t use traditional mapping, how do you get it to appear in the keyboard viewer?

You can't do that anymore, keyboard viewer will only show Unicode standard mappings, you have to use the Character Viewer, e.g. View = glyph.

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Answer 3

MuzikJunky Author

Level 2

288 points

Mar 1, 2010 8:45 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

What if the glyph isn’t a typical glyph, such as a CD SPARS code in the CombiSymbols typeface, which are mapped to a, s, and d? Peace.

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Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Mar 2, 2010 5:22 AM in response to MuzikJunky

What if the glyph isn’t a typical glyph, such as a CD SPARS code in the CombiSymbols typeface, which are mapped to a, s, and d?

You go to Character Viewer, view = glyph, font = CombiSymbols and hopefully your app will let you input the character via double-click or the insert with font button.

Personally I think is correct that Keyboard Viewer should always reflect standard Unicode mappings that non-standard characters should be entered by other means.

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Answer 5

MuzikJunky Author

Level 2

288 points

Mar 5, 2010 11:33 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

That helps a bunch, and I agree with your sentiment (which was present in Leopard 10.5), but it doesn’t tell me which key to press to get the desired glyph. Peace.

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