Issue with Favourites in Character Viewer

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Issue with Favourites in Character Viewer

As I have to use many phonetic symbols for work, I have been a heavy user of Character Viewer, registering a few dozens of characters as Favorites. On Lion I could drag those characters to change their order; however, since moving to Mountain Lion, dragging a character actually deletes it, making it impossible to manage my list. Further, sometime a character would disappear just by clicking it.

It seems to be a bug, and not a change in the way Favourites works since Mountain Lion; but I wondered if this is an issue only on my system, or everybody with Mountain Lion is experiencing it? And does anybody know a way to fix it?

Thanks in advance

Posted on Jan 14, 2013 1:06 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 14, 2013 1:31 AM in response to tatsuya

I've been using PopChar for years now - it's quite inexpensive and a better alternative to Character Viewer. Use the trail version and see if it's useful for you.

Good luck,

Clinton

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

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Jan 14, 2013 6:39 AM in response to tatsuya

tatsuya wrote:

since moving to Mountain Lion, dragging a character actually deletes it, making it impossible to manage my list. Further, sometime a character would disappear just by clicking it.

I have not seen this reported elsewhere so far, and dragging works right for me. You might try moving the .plist with CharacterPalette in its name in Home/Library/Preferences to your desktop and restarting (that may mean you have to reenter all your favorites however). To reach Home/Library you have to hold the Option key down while doing Finder > Go.

An alternative to PopChar (in case you don't find 30€ that "inexpensive") might be

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ultra-character-map/id520265986?mt=12

But I don't think it lets you change the favorites order.

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Answer 3

tatsuya Author

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Jan 14, 2013 7:57 AM in response to clintonfrombirmingham

Thank you so much for your post. I installed the trial version of PopChar, but unfortunately most of the features I wanted to try before purchasing it are only for registered users.

As Character Viewer works perfectly on my Lion desktop (the problem is only on my Mountain Lion MacBook Pro) I guess I will spend another few days trying to fix this issue.

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Answer 4

tatsuya Author

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Jan 14, 2013 8:03 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hi Tom, and thanks for your post. I had actually tried to delete both the CharacterPaletteIM.plist and the CharacterPicker.plist and restart Character Viewer, but the issue persisted. I checked Ultra Character Map and, as you say, you cannot customize the favorites order. Thanks a lot for the suggestion anyway!

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

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115,946 points

Jan 14, 2013 8:16 AM in response to tatsuya

Try setting up a new user acct and see if the problem persists when you are logged into that.

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Answer 6

tatsuya Author

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Jan 14, 2013 7:53 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thank you for your new post, Tom.

I had actually tried that, but the problem persists (which made me believe that maybe it was a general bug of the Character Viewer in Mountain Lion... but as you say that you don't have the same issue, it must be something on my system)

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Answer 7

tatsuya Author

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Jan 18, 2013 1:46 AM in response to tatsuya

UPDATE

I've been to an Apple Store today: I verified all the machines running 10.8.2, and all the Retina Display MacBookPro showed the same issue; all the non-Retina Display machines were OK. I reported the problem to a Genius and we came to the conclusion that it's a 10.8.2 bug. He said he will report it to Apple, so for a while... let's cross our fingers and hope that Apple fix this problem soon.

Thanks to Tom and clintofrombirmingham for their help!

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Answer 8

Tom Gewecke

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Jan 18, 2013 5:34 AM in response to tatsuya

tatsuya wrote:

I verified all the machines running 10.8.2, and all the Retina Display MacBookPro showed the same issue; all the non-Retina Display machines were OK.

This bug in the operation of Character Viewer only occurs with Retina displays? That is really strange!

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Answer 9

tatsuya Author

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Jan 18, 2013 8:08 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hi, Tom!

It doesn't appear to be so strange, actually.

I've got a couple of graphic apps that work perfectly on my 10.8.2 MacPro, but not on my 10.8.2 Retina MacBookPro. In one case - a nice app called "image2icon" that allows you to create .icns file very simply - there was a major Retina-only issue where you could not save files (the developers have already fixed that, but it seems that it took them a while to understand why Retina machines behaved differently than other machines using the same system). That was the first time I got aware of the fact that the difference between Retina and non-Retina machines is not only in the screen, but also in the system.

The Genius at the Apple Store also confirmed me that they have a lot of issues related to using Xcode on Retina-display MacBookPros, and they are currently recommending heavy users of Xcode to avoid using Retina-display machines until they got it fixed. BTW, changing the resolution of the screen doesn't resolve any of those issues (the Genius tried to do it on my MacBookPro, but it didn't work).

I have reported this Character Viewer glitch on the Apple Bug Reporter, so let's hope they find a solution very soon. However, I found no mention of any Retina-only fix on 10.8.3 builds seeded by Apple lately, so probably it will take some time.

Enjoy your weekend!

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Answer 10

Tom Gewecke

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115,946 points

Jan 19, 2013 7:53 AM in response to tatsuya

Thanks for the additional info. It is kind of a nightmare for troubleshooting software malfunctions if you have to take into account the screen type. At least until everyone has retina:-)

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