Well, now that I've made the ghastly mistake of "upgrading" to 10.9....
Is there any way to make the "Font Variation" aspect of Character Viewer behave the way it did in 10.6? I want to see all the font names all the time, each under its glyph, not just the font of a single glyph when I click on it. How do I know which fonts contain a particular character?
Lucy2424 wrote:
Is there any way to make the "Font Variation" aspect of Character Viewer behave the way it did in 10.6? I want to see all the font names all the time, each under its glyph, not just the font of a single glyph when I click on it.
No, it's not possible (ever since 10.7, by the way).
I think the app Ultra Character Map can do what you want.
Most apps will automatically use a font which has the character, even if you have selected one that does not.
Lucy2424 wrote:
Is there any way to make the "Font Variation" aspect of Character Viewer behave the way it did in 10.6? I want to see all the font names all the time, each under its glyph, not just the font of a single glyph when I click on it.
No, it's not possible (ever since 10.7, by the way).
I think the app Ultra Character Map can do what you want.
Most apps will automatically use a font which has the character, even if you have selected one that does not.
Tom Gewecke wrote:
I think the app Ultra Character Map can do what you want.
Most apps will automatically use a font which has the character, even if you have selected one that does not.
Yup. I can remember when users of That Other Platform had to have it explained to them that Font Substitution is good and useful and desirable. That was only about 10 years ago. For that matter, I can also remember when "Font Substitution" meant that your printer replaced New York with Times. I definitely don't miss that stage! But there are still times I'd like to know which fonts actually contain a given character.
I'll have to assume that all the other useful features are also gone:
Sigh.
Ultra Character Map may indeed be what I want. $9.99. Thanks, Apple! It riles me that someone decided all these features are not only unnecessary but actively harmful, requiring their removal from OS > 10.6. There's no way to downgrade your operating system, is there? 😟
Lucy2424 wrote:
paste into application
That's still the main purpose of Character Viewer (to input special characters into apps). You use drag/drop or double click instead of copy/paste.
The Unicode Hex keyboard is kind of obsolete, as it is totally impractical for characters with codes higher than FFFF (of which there are now a great many, including most emoji).
Follow-up:
show character selected in application
I've now discovered that if you select one or more characters in a text editor before opening the Character Viewer window, they will be shown as Search Results. And then by further clicking you can find the character in its unicode-range context. If the window is already open, or if you're in other types of app (I tried a couple of browsers) it only works if you copy-and-paste into the Search box.
The Unicode Hex keyboard is kind of obsolete, as it is totally impractical for characters with codes higher than FFFF (of which there are now a great many, including most emoji).
How often do you use emoji in ordinary typing? The non-typeable characters I need most often, like the scribal abbreviations tucked away in assorted Latin-Extended ranges, are comfortably within 4 digits.
Lucy2424 wrote:
The non-typeable characters I need most often, like the scribal abbreviations tucked away in assorted Latin-Extended ranges, are comfortably within 4 digits.
If there are a bunch of these you use all the time, you might want to create a custom keyboard layout that includes them, using
"Font Variation" in character viewer
