Inserting Curly brackets as shapes

You may have figured this out already using the other program suggested above, but you are able to do this without downloading anything else just using Keynote and Preview.

Make two text boxes and enter the { } each in their own box. Then select one of them and copy. Open Preview and File>New from Clipboard +(or command n)+. Then you can copy that and paste back into Keynote, or if you use them a lot, save as a .pdf or .png (to keep the transparency) and save to your hard drive.

You are correct, the shapes in Keynote are much more limited than they are in Powerpoint.

I use LaTeXIT to generate all my equations, etc. for my Keynote presentations and when I drag them into Keynote, they are images that I can resize. The command for the simple "curly bracket" is \{ in LaTeX if you are not familiar with it. There are a HUGE number of special shapes, fonts, symbols, etc. available in LaTeX. All of which are vectorized and will look fantastic at whatever resolution you change them to.

LaTeXIT: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science/latexit.html

It's not the easiest solution, but if you are a math/science/engineering type you will find it very useful.

I didn't know about LaTeXiT. Thanks for the tip. I just DL'd it, and yes, it seems as if I'll be using it from time to time.

Having said that, I am unable to make the specific character mentioned by the OP, the curly bracket "{", with LaTeXiT. It seems it understands it as the beginning of a code, which will end with "}", to display what's between the brackets. This problem does not exist for the other bracket characters, "[" and "(" (and their reverses), which LeTeXiT fine. I'd be pleased if you could reveal how curly brackets are made.

And finally, the shapes in KN are more limited than in PP. Still, using text typed within a shape does allow more versatility than text in a textbox. You can change the fill and line around the shape; you can change the font of the text and its size, but not by re-sizing the shape, but by using the font menu. The results are usually fine, for me, and not terribly tedious. AND, I can make a very good "{" that way, which so far I can't with LaTeXiT.

\{
should work in LaTeXiT. You can also try
\Biggr \{

to make it bigger without changing the default font size. The full library is very impressive. A nice list of all the available symbols can be found here:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/symbols/comprehensive/

Thanx, reezer! Very impressive indeed, and very helpful!

I also had trouble figuring out how to use LaTeXiT. I spoke to a friend who uses LaTeX, and he told me that I needed to install LaTeX in order for LaTeXiT to work, since LaTeX is the language that LaTeXiT (which is only a GUI editor) runs on. You can download LaTeX for OS X at the following website:

<http://ii2.sourceforge.net/tex-index.html>.

It will take a while to download as it is large. Once you download it, unzip it and load the disk image, and you will be set to go. At that point, LaTeXiT will correctly display the output of any commands that you enter.

As a sidenote, because LaTeX is a language, you can also compile output on Terminal or in any text editor that supports it (unfortunately, not TextEdit), allowing you to create PDF versions of any symbols you enter. You do not need to use LaTeXiT; it's just a handy tool.

I hope this was helpful.

Thanks for the tip; I hadn't tried this. I tried both this and using LaTeXiT to create and resize a curly bracket shape, and their products looked and behaved similarly.

One thing I'd like to mention that took me awhile to figure out when I was working with my curly brace shape is that if you want to stretch it, you need to uncheck the "constrain proportions" box under the Metrics tab of the Inspector. I couldn't find this under any other threads re: Keynote, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to mention it here since it seems relevant.