ascii symbols on Mavericks?

Phil Stokes wrote:

My only complaint about that shortcut is it makes the character window front but not active, which means you're forced to go to the mouse/trackpad anyway to activate it. You can't even dismiss the viewer with a keyboard shortcut until you click on it either.

When you ^⌘␠ to instantiate it, if you see this "traditional" display:

then click on the button in the extreme upper right, and the display will be transformed into this:

And this particular panel does have focus when summoned, and can be navigated with just the arrow keys, and tab and shift-tab. Yes, this is not what I'd consider intuitive, nor is any of this documented among the shortcuts lists I've found, but it is part of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and it does do what you want.

Choose "Code Tables" at the bottom of the customize list, and you'll see Unicode as an option, which includes the ASCII set.

A separate ASCII entry is gone from special characters and its customization menu. You can find ASCII characters in the ISO-8859-1, or Unicode categories, though not as handily. These are also presented as Unicode sequences, and non-printing codes appear as empty boxes, though you can click on the box to see its code representation.

The lower ASCII code table is available in the Terminal as a man page. man ascii. Or the same content can be found in a text file at /usr/share/misc/ascii.

Browser bookmarks:

ASCII Code - The extended ASCII table

Unicode click-addressable character table

If you enable the Unicode keyboard from System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources, you can directly enter Unicode charcters in OS X via option key + code. (e.g. U+0040 is entered as option + 0040 and is the @ char)

And, you can Google search for: ascii table, and select images for ascii table. Find and view the image you believe will suit your needs, then save it to your Desktop. You can then single-click the image and press the space-bar to have Quick Look display it. Works with .svg files too.

My only complaint about that shortcut is it makes the character window front but not active, which means you're forced to go to the mouse/trackpad anyway to activate it. You can't even dismiss the viewer with a keyboard shortcut until you click on it either.

I keep meaning to file this as a bug, but then get lost in despair at how Apple rarely listen to mild user annoyances so always end up deciding not to bother.

I went to add Unicode to my list of supported input sources in System Preferences/Keyboard/Input Sources. Unicode is not listed as an addable input source font (i know font is not the correct word but not sure what is). Now that Unicode is adding a whole lot of new Emoji's, I would like to be able to access them.

Special Characters > Gear icon dropdown > Customize List... > Code Tables : Unicode

Entirely FWIW, using ^⌘␠ (control-command-spacebar) is a handy way of invoking the character viewer.

Another source, in Terminal: man ascii

...never mind 🙂

Many thanks for that steer. Now I can puzzle all my friends by putting Cherokee and Ethiopian symbols in my emails.

Or Dothrakian.😉