Find and Use Special Text Characters in OS 10.4

Ever wonder how to find and use special text characters such as ©, ™, £, ¢, ‰, ƒ on your Mac? I use a Matias Tactile Pro keyboard that used to have these images printed on the keys – but they’ve since worn away. The Apple Pro keyboards and Apple laptop keyboards don’t have these characters printed on them, either. Luckily OS 10.4 has a built-in menu to help you access these special characters.

There are two ways to access the menu. From Mac OS X apps (Mail, TextEdit, Stickies, etc.), browse to the menu bar at the top of the screen and choose Edit > Special Characters.

Or, add Character Palette to your menu bar, so you can access it when you’re working in almost any application (like MS Word or Adobe InDesign). Do this by clicking on the blue Apple in the upper left corner of your screen, and launch System Preferences and select “International.” Clicking on the “Input Menu” tab, turn on the checkbox for Character Palette, and you’ll see a little American flag in the right side of the menu bar. Click on the flag and choose “Show Character Palette” to launch the Character Palette.

How to use it: launch Character Palette, and look for the “View” drop-down menu in the upper left hand corner. Open the menu and choose “All Characters.” Now chose “the By Category tab” under the drop-down menu. The left column shows a list of special character categories, and the right column shows the individual characters in each category.

To get one of these characters into your text document, just click on the character and click the Insert button in the bottom right-hand corner of the Character Palette menu.

If you find yourself using the same special characters over and over (like ©, ™, etc.), you can add these to your Favorites list, and access them from the Favorites tab in the Character Palette. To see which fonts contain certain characters (they don’t all share the same special characters), expand the Character Palette by clicking on the down-facing arrow next to Font Variation on the bottom-left side of the palette. This brings up another panel where you can choose different fonts. You can also make this list show only fonts that support the character you have highlighted.