type a number inside a circle with keyboard

You may have to experiment with Unicode or other cross-platform font codes to do that.

•Wingdings character set and equivalent Unicode characters:

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html

In previous OS X versions, the Character Viewer and other sections had different items

such as 'wingdings' and other items; one item copied from an obsolete OS X version:

A pathway to general Macintosh symbols appears here:

http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/keyboards/charpalosx.html

Sometimes, different items are available in another language

that are native to that, and only available in your own if you

choose to use codes; unless they've been conveniently added

in such a place as Character viewer options. Since I'm just now

looking into Mavericks 10.9.5 (new-old-stock Mac, from Apple,

my newest OS X and newest computer) I'm mostly unfamiliar.

A good person to have reply to your post would be Tom Gewecke

as he's aware of so many of these things, and more. Some pages

(mac.com) of content he'd created are no longer available online

in regard to this topic. He contributes to these ASC discussions.

http://unicode.org/consortium/members.html

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/

Sorry to not be of much help; as I've been reading across several

pages while attempting to post a sensical reply... w/o much luck.

In any event... happy computing! 🙂

Thank you (both) for adding a needed clarifying reply; I've not used Character viewer

all that much since OS X Tiger 10.4.11, or hardly at all in Leopard 10.5.8 (still in use)

and just looked into Mavericks 10.9.5 version recently. It has changed, and the means

to customize the list in Character Viewer is by drop-down menu in the Gear icon section.

While in Mavericks 10.9.5 character viewer, I was able to add the Digits section that

by default (as shipped) did not appear at all. Older OS X version was by default in mine.

So to the original poster, you do have both the unicode and also the Character viewer

choice, depending on your need & availability of a variety of character set(s) needed.

Recent screenshot of Mavericks 'Character Viewer' w/ enabled Digits section, follows:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/11/mac-101-using-the-keyboard-viewer-in-os-x-mav ericks/

•OS X Mavericks: Use the Keyboard Viewer - apple support (also for character viewer)

In Yosemite, some names were changed; and since I'm not using 10.10.x yet, (have a

second HDD in my newest Mac ready for a second OS X) I'm not sure of those details.

They are documented and by experimentation one use either method; if desired both.

Again, thank you Tom G. as well as Viking, for your responses to the user request for help. 🙂

Rose Matthews wrote:

how to type a number inside a circle with keyboard

As explained by K Shaffer, you can't use the keyboard for this, you have to use the Character Viewer

How to type accents, emoji, and symbols on your Mac - Apple Support

or just copy/paste from something like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosed_Alphanumerics

Another that shows 'enclosed alphanumerics' is this Unicode test for support in web browsers:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/enclosed_alphanumerics.html

And Unicode + multilingual support in HTML, fonts, web browsers & other applications:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/index.html

Not sure if these are helpful in any direct way, unless you also study how to use them.

There was a time I tested some of these and their code number will generate the item

under certain circumstances. At the time, I did not need to utilize unicode very much.

Anyway, by now you probably have found the solution; one way, or one of the others. 🙂

The Character Viewer can be found via the Edit menu > Special Characters… in pre-Yosemite OS X, or in the same location on Yosemite, but with the name Emoji & Symbols. Most Apple applications including the Finder have this feature.

The Character Viewer has a gear icon in its upper left toolbar location, and on it contains a Customize List… menu item. This gives you access to categories of characters (e.g. Digits - All, unicode, etc.) which will appear in the left column of the panel. You can double-click characters to have them inserted into your document at the current insertion position.

Often, you will see Unicode characters represented as U+2460 ① . You can actually type this unicode string in the Character Viewer search window, and the corresponding character code will appear. In HTML, it would be represented as "①" without the quotes. You can see these values in the previously linked Enclosed Alphanumerics chart.

Here is another link to substantial unicode tables organized by unicode range from a web selector. These can be copy/pasted, or simply drag/dropped into a document such as TextEdit. Not all will image in the local document (or web page) due to limitations of the current encoding standard (e.g. UTF-8) used.