Getting keyboard viewer to show symbols

Normally these days everyone works in Unicode, which means all fonts have the same Latin characters produced by the standard keyboard. To make special symbols, you now use the Character Viewer instead of just changing the font. Go to Edit > Emoji & Symbols. You may need to expand the panel and click on the gear wheel to customize to get the things you want.

Zapfino is a normal font which you should be able to write in from the keyboard. It also has some symbols, but I can't remember at the moment how one gets them...

That font selection for the keyboard viewer went away with OS 9. In the Mac App Store, search: font keyboard. This will bring up apps that will show characters on a keyboard for the chosen font.

lucca969 wrote:

I tried "Go to Edit > Emoji & Symbols" in Word

If you are using Word 2011, it is kind of obsolete and no longer supported. In Word 2016 I have

You can also get the Character Viewer by checking a box in system prefs/keyboard/keyboard and then going to the "flag" menu at the top right of the screen.

macOS Sierra: Use emoji and symbols

This shows how you get zapfino ornaments in an Apple app. I don't think Word can do it.

The Edit menu : Emoji & Symbols menu item is optional to third-party vendors that build Cocoa versions of the applications. If those applications are written in C++ and use another GUI toolkit (e.g. Qt5, Gtk, etc.), then that menu item will not be available. LibreOffice doesn't have this menu item because of the previous sentence.

In older releases of OS X, the Emoji & Symbols menu item was named Special Characters (maybe not exactly as I am typing this from memory).

lucca969 wrote:

VikingOSX,

When i tried to access the App store all I got were numerous opportunities to buy everything but apps.

You normally get to the app store via this icon in your Dock.