Keyboard view of dingbats and other pictorial fonts

SO, does this Ultra Character Map show what I'm looking for, a keyboard layout for any specific font style, so I can click the Shift, Option or Control key to see what variations are in there?

Yes. Choose the font you want to display, then press your key combination. If there is a glyph in the font assigned to that keystroke, it will jump to that glyph. Given that you can have up to 65,536 glyphs in a OpenType font, not all of them are going to have a keystroke, so you'd have to scroll through the display to see the ones without an assigned keystroke, which would be most of them.

This image shows a glyph with a keystroke and shows you what it is under Keyboard equivalent (upper right).

This character has no keystroke, so just shows with a double dash (null).

You can also right click on a glyph and choose "Copy", then paste it into your app. Especially helpful of course for characters which have no keystroke.

If activated in the System/Keyboard preference pane this

will give you this:

OT

...The Character Viewer is useless, since one can't chose a specific font style (what font is used there, anyway?)...

When there are variations of a symbol the font is displayed in the upper right hand corner:

You can copy and paste or drag it from the Character window into the document you're working in: »

PopChar has one very annoying "feature". It only shows glyphs in a font which have a Unicode value assigned to them. So this means just about any older Type 1 PostScript, or Mac legacy TrueType fonts will show up blank in PopChar.

It is true that the computing industry is going to Unicode font systems only, but that still doesn't help when even modern fonts aren't fully Unicode. There are many fonts in Adobe's Font Folio 11 which are like that. An .otf font will have Unicode values for most of a given font, but not for all glyphs. So PopChar will not show you ligatures and other special characters which are in the font, and there's no way to make it do so.

A much better choice for OS X users, and much cheaper than PopChar is Ultra Character Map. Available through the Mac App Store for only $10. This utility will show you all glyphs in any font, whether they're Unicode or not.

Character Viewer as supplied with OS X does work, but you can't make it show you only one font, as it could in Snow Leopard and earlier.

mynameismyname wrote:

Nice.... Still, I'd expect my Mac to be smart enough to do this by itself, w/o resorting to outside software.

Unfortunately it doesn't, and hasn't since 10.5. Here's what Tom Gewecke, one of the forum experts in language and font issues, said back then:

Fundamentally systems like OS X are intended to be used with Unicode standard fonts. With these, Keyboard Viewer always shows the same characters for the same layout, regardless of the active font, and its purpose is really to show how keyboard mappings have changed when the keyboard layout is changed, normally for inputting a different language. Dingbats, ornaments, and other symbols (whose total vastly exceeds the number any keyboard could reach anyway) are put in the Unicode ranges reserved for them or in the Private Use Area instead of in the Roman range, and it is expected people would access them via the Character Palette or similar utility, perhaps using a Favorites option (or creating a custom keyboard layout) for those they need frequently.

You can comment to Apple on the issue via their feedback page, if you wish:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

but since the option to choose font in Keyboard Viewer was removed long ago, it's unlikely to come back. So third-party utilities are going to be your only option if you wish to see a keyboard-layout-type view while being able to select fonts.

Regards.

Amazing how many unnecessary steps backward every big company takes in a year. Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer are both major downgrades, and for what? But that's the way it is. I'm wary of third-party utilities, and a cheapskate, too, so I just typed out my whole keyboard from ~ (tilde) to / (slash) four ways (plain, shift, option, shift+option) and then formatted copies in all my favored dingbat, symbol & ornament fonts in a word-processing document. Saved that as a .pdf, and there it is, ready to look at in Preview any time. Took a quarter hour or so, but the nice thing is, as long as Macs can display .pdf, it'll work fine, and it'll never interfere with any software I'm running.

If you have access to Snow Leopard, which actually had a useful character viewer, go to /System/Library/Input Methods/ and copy the app CharacterPalette to your Mountain Lion drive. Put it anywhere in your user account and then drag it onto the Dock for easy access.

PopChar is still available:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7813/popchar-x

Regards.