Please Help: Adding caret and dash over any character.

I think the only way you are going to be able to do that for non-normal accented characters would be to use the character viewer (Edit menu, Special Characters…).

Click the Gear menu and choose Customize List…

Open the Code Tables and select Unicode and click Done

Select Unicode from the list and scroll down to the Combining Diacritical Marks section.

Drag the combining marks you need into the Favorites section. With it in Favorites, you don't have to dig into the Unicode table.

Now, type a character, then drag the appropriate combining mark onto the letter. It should combine. It's a bit figity sometimes.

You also may find the character already created in the list of characters. You can add those to the Favorites and use them from there.

Some can be created by pressing opt+<accent key> then combining character. For instance, opt+i, e will produce ê. If you use the US Extended (or any Extended) keyboard, you can make more combinations. However, I couldn't make p̂ without using the Character Viewer.

To enable the Extended Keyboard, open Keyboard System Preferences, Input Sources tab and click the Add ( + ) button. Select the Extended keyboard you want to use, then click Add. Also check Show input menu in menu bar.

From the Flag menu, you can choose the new input method. Select it, and also select Show Keyboard Viewer. If you hold down the option key, you'll see all of the combining diacritical marks you can use with this method highlighted in orange.

One other weird problem I ran into. All of a sudden I couldn't drag the characters around anymore. I closed out the Character Viewer and reopened, but it still wouldn't drag. I closed again and opened Activity Monitor. I found a characterviewer process running and forced it to quit. Then, it worked again.

Barney-15E wrote:

Thanks, I figured you might have an answer.

However, the carat is shifted to the left.

Yes, when you type the diacritic after the base letter, you may have to switch fonts to get the best result. Lucida Grande usually works well.

Barney-15E wrote:

I couldn't make p̂ without using the Character Viewer.

With US Extended that is p followed by option + shift + 6. p̄ is p followed by option + shift + a.

Thanks, I figured you might have an answer.

However, the carat is shifted to the left.