How do you access special characters in fonts?

Question

Level 1

9 points

How do you access special characters in fonts?

I'm moving from OLD software and old Macs to the new Mac Pro. I'm trying to access the special characters in ZapfDingbats (among others) and find that the option+character no longer produces the character I want, even though Font Book displays them in Repertoire view. I can't find a way to discover what key combinations produces the new characters in Symbol, for example.

Can someone direct me to a transitional primer? This is my first experience with OS X.

Thanks.

Mac Pro, PowerMac 6500, iMac (old), Mac OS X (10.4.7), Have old Macs; need help transferring data

Posted on Sep 25, 2006 6:21 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 25, 2006 6:41 AM in response to sunstone

In the "Input" pane of "International" System Preferences you can enable "Character Palette" and "Keyboard Viewer". That will put a flag in the menu bar next to the clock to access them.
Another way to get special characters is in the "Edit" menu of most applications, (Cmd-Option-T). Select the character you want and click "Insert". You can create a list of favorites.

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Answer 2

sunstone Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 25, 2006 9:23 AM in response to Malcolm Rayfield

I really appreciate your effort to help me, but...

All I can say is, "Oh, GAWD, NO!" I taught foreign languages for years and one of the reasons I absolutely LOVED the Macintosh (in addition to the fact that all I had to be able to do was "point my finger"; I bought the third one sold in my small Oklahoma city in 1983) was that typing special characters was so easy. I could type as fast using Option-E-E, for example, to get a word with an accent mark over the "e" as I could "regular English." When I finally did cave and buy a PC, I discovered that it was extremely difficult to get the special characters, thus continued to produce all my handouts and teaching material on the Mac. Am I going to regret that I've bought this new Mac Pro??? I cannot possibly "make a list of my favorites"! I need what I need when I need it. I have a fortune invested in graphic design software, most of which I have just recently upgraded to use with the new Mac Pro (although the sales person with whom I spoke on the phone before I placed my Mac Pro order assured me it would run in "classic mode," which, of course, it will not) and in fonts, some of which I purchased because of the need of just one character for a client's project.

There's just got to be a better answer....

I sure hope so. But now, having vented, I will go explore the options you suggest, in hopes that I have over-reacted. I haven't poked around in Preferences.

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Answer 3

Sep 25, 2006 9:30 AM in response to sunstone

I could type as fast using Option-E-E, for example, to get a word with an accent mark over the "e" as I could "regular English."

Why can't you do that now? I do this exact thing. The Keyboard Viewer is simply a Key Caps (Mac OS 9) replacement. Not a lot has changed in this regard and the option characters are the same as always.

I think you've over-reacted a little due to the different appearance. At least I hope you have.

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Answer 4

sunstone Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 25, 2006 12:48 PM in response to infinite vortex

Possibly. But this morning when attempting to produce the club, diamond, spade, and heart symbols using the Option+ a character as indicated on my chart, all I was able to produce was the double cross, no matter what keyboard character I typed with Option. Something must be different.

???

Been really busy with client work all day and have not had an opportunity to prowl around in Preferences or experiment much. Hang in there with me folks; I really appreciate your help!

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Answer 5

Sep 25, 2006 12:54 PM in response to sunstone

What font are you using because I don't see any clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades anywhere with any modifier keys combinations.

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Answer 6

sunstone Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 25, 2006 2:19 PM in response to infinite vortex

ZapfDingbats

What I was trying to do was a silly little thing, really:
I just wanted to substitute actual type in a design for a T-shirt so that I could resize the graphic, play with the "designs" (characters), recolor them, etc., so as not to step on a copyright. I can do that easily on my PowerMac, using the font ZapfDingbats and the shift and option keys to access the symbols (characters) that I want. I have many, many "dingbat" fonts, some of which have a full repertoire of symbol, accessible via shift and option combinations. I've done it for years, easily and quickly, on the PowerMac.

It's no crisis if I can't fix this T-shirt, but I will run screaming into the street if I can't type Spanish diacritical marks when I return to my Spanish lesson materials.

Mac Pro, PowerMac 6500, iMac (old) Mac OS X (10.4.7) Have old Macs; need help transferring data

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Answer 7

Sep 25, 2006 2:49 PM in response to sunstone

Firstly, your problem with Zapf Dingbats is a problem with the font itself, rather, it depends on what application is tring to use it. What I've noticed is that those applications that run under Rosetta are fine yet those that do not require Rosetta display it as standard Roman characters. It's rather weird.

As for accented characters, these work fine. I use them on a daily basis and have never had a reason to think that they won't.

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Answer 8

Sep 25, 2006 7:39 PM in response to sunstone

I have to chime in here. The diacritical characters work for me in OS X (so far), though I don't use them all that much. The problem I have been experiencing is the the dingbats don't work right, and I use those a lot. I have tried PopChar, which shows me the keyboard combo that supposedly types a given character. It seldom works. I'd like to know what has changed. OS X now seems to treat dingbat character sets differently from "normal" ones. I am very frustrated by this.
While the "Show Character Palette" is somewhat useful, it doesn't tell you what the keyboard combo is! Seems like a no-brainer to show the key combo. Hello Apple? Let's give the full function please...

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Answer 9

sunstone Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 25, 2006 7:54 PM in response to Patrick Mullen

Ditto above. I worked as a copy editor/typesetter for a large newspaper in Arizona. It was heaven: a sea of Macs with HUGE monitors! I just cannot imagine that fast typists and typesetters across the nation (and world, I suppose) are going to be content with a multi-step process that includes "Insert".

I have followed the first advice, but I do not believe that that is my problem. I see that I can change language; that's not what I want to do.

Font Book and a bunch of fonts came installed on my new Mac Pro. After I became aware of my "Dingbat" problem, I prowled around looking at other fonts I know have "additional characters." I looked at the Symbol repertoire, much much expanded from the original 1983 Symbol font! But NO HINT as to how one would actually produce a symbol from waaaay down in the list. Surely we are not alone. Surely someone knows how to do this? I've visited my old Mac haunts, abandoned for years as I pouted because I couldn't upgrade to a machine that could accommodate OS X. I quit my Mac magazine subscriptions. Yes, I shouldn't have done that; I should have saved them all, and paid to move them recently across four states, so that if I won the lottery and could upgrade my Mac, I might be able to catch up on all the "new stuff."

Surely someone who's been there, done that can help???

And, in the past it hasn't mattered what application I was using. The keyboard combinations used to produce additional characters worked the same in PageMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator, SimpleText, Quark, whatever...

Mac Pro, PowerMac 6500, iMac (old) Mac OS X (10.4.7) Have old Macs; need help transferring data

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Answer 10

sunstone Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 25, 2006 8:02 PM in response to sunstone

I guess I should have expected it: an Intel processor, a Mac that can run Windows, ahhhh, lads, have we lost half of the wonderful things about Mac? Like "Option". Option does many wonderful things.

I may have found the definitive answer here:
http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/specialchar.html

But I am so sad...
How tedious, how slow.
How PC-ish.

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Answer 11

Sep 25, 2006 11:51 PM in response to sunstone

what about this option?

unicode hex option:

You can use the utility in OS X to generate many Unicode characters by manually inputting the hexadecimal code. Other options include saving word processor files as Unicode or UTF text.

Note: This utility works in supported only in newer applications including Dreamweaver MX, Firefox, Mozilla, Office 2004 and Text Edit.

1. Make sure you have activated the Unicode Hex Input keyboard. See the activate keyboards section for more details.
2. Open an application which supports Unicode HexInput such as TextEdit. TextEdit is installed with OS X and can be opened from the Dock or the Applications folder.
3. Switch keyboards to the Unicode Hex Input from the flag icon dropdown menu on the upper right. If the Unicode Hex Option is grayed out, then you are in an application which does not support this utility.
4. To input a specific character, hold down the option key, then type in the four-digit hexadecimal Unicode value (e.g. 044D = Cyrillic э). Charts listing Unicode values for different scripts are available at www.unicode.org/charts.

quoted from http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international/keyboards/mackey.html

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Answer 12

sunstone Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 26, 2006 5:03 AM in response to Belldandy

Thank you, Sakuya, for this information.

I guess the answer to my question is, "You can't, as you used to be able to do on Macs, without a bunch of trouble."

So sad, so sad...

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