Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's look at how you can type special characters on your Mac.
Let's look at how to type all sorts of special characters.
Anything that is not standard on your keyboard.
We'll start at the beginning here with simple variations of characters usually with accent
marks and such.
In Yosemite, and Mavericks before it, it is very easy to type these.
All you need to do is pick the root letter, like say an e, and instead of tapping it on
the keyboard tap and hold down.
You get this little menu here of all the different variations.
Then you can use the number underneath it to get the one you want.
So, for instance, I can tap 1 on the keyboard and I get that.
I could have also selected it with the cursor to get it.
So it is very easy to do that with any character like for instance a Y or Z.
Anything that has got a special variation will pop-up with this.
You don't have to remember any special keyboard combination or go to any special place to
get it.
So for most text that you need to type in most languages that use Latin characters you
can very quickly get these special characters that way.
Now if you've used Macs for a while you may remember there is a special way to bring up
these characters using the Option key.
For instance I can type Option e and you see an accent mark appear and it is actually highlighted
in yellow.
Then I can type the letter e and it puts it above it.
You can do Option e again and type an a, for instance.
Now the way to know these is to find a website that lists them all and kind of memorize them.
But you can also bring up the Keyboard Viewer.
We're going to use both the Keyboard and Character Viewer a lot in this.
So let's go and add those.
We're going to go to System Preferences, go to Keyboard, and under the keyboard setting
select Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar.
You will see this icon appear here that allows us to bring those up.
So now we can go and bring up the Keyboard Viewer and this keyboard is something used
to type when clicking on it with the mouse but you can also see how it reacts when you
hold down the Shift key or the Option key.
Here this clearly shows the special keys that have accent marks.
If I want to add this type of accent mark to any letter that uses it you can see it
is the i key, Option and i.
So over here I will do Option i and then type i and I get that character.
So it is a quick way to learn these by using the Keyboard Viewer just to see which key
turns orange when you hold down the Option key.
But what if we wanted to go further than that and type all sorts of odd characters that
aren't just simple variations.
Well you can use the Keyboard Viewer here and say look at the Option key and find things
like the registered trademark symbol, there's pi.
You can do combinations like Option and Shift and find even more things, like there's the
Apple symbol which is Option Shift and k.
You can do that but it will only reveal just a few that you can easily type.
To reveal more you want to go to the Character Viewer.
The Character Viewer brings up this whole control panel here that allows you to explore
all the different characters and all the fonts on your machine.
You can select something like say Arrows over here and see all sorts of different arrows.
If you want to type one all you need to do is double click it and it will insert it wherever
it is you are typing.
Now what is listed here on the left can be changed.
So if mine looks different than yours all you need to do is to go to this settings menu
here, customized the list, and you can see things that you can add or remove from the
list.
There is all sorts of different types of things that you can add here like Braille patterns,
different arrows, Dingbats, all sorts of different things.
Once you do it changes the menu over here.
So I click on Dingbats and now we see all these cool little special characters.
If I select them not only do I get a larger view over here but I could, as before, double
click to add it.
I can even drag and drop as well.
So there is a lot of different things you can do.
You can select variations on here.
So I see Webdings here but I can do Webdings 2 going through all the different fonts that
I've got installed on my Mac to see what is available.
Now you can also search for characters.
Search works reasonably well.
You will notice that some of these characters include some special text that accompanies
it that will help in searches but others do not.
So, for instance, if we're looking in Webdings here for things and we look at this and we
want to search for house it doesn't come up.
But we do get a couple other variations and you can see that's kind of in the name there
like that.
So sometimes if you are looking for something special you can find it by searching.
Other times you can't but you do have the ability to add things into your favorites.
You've got your Recently Used, you can see ones I've recently used here.
But also if we go into Emoji here and we want to add something to Favorites we can drag
and drop into Favorites there and it will appear.
So now we can easily find it next time instead of searching for it in here just by clicking
on Favorites to see it listed.
So you can also go in and search for something and then find variations on it.
So, for instance, we look under Bullets here and we want to find some sort of special bullet
character we can see related versions of it and variations.
So there is different types of bullets.
Sometimes variations are very similar to the one you've got but they are just done with
different fonts.
So you can choose which font you are going to be accessing.
Say I want to use the Arial one right here as opposed to using the one inside dingbats.
You want to be careful when using some of the characters as they don't always work in
all applications.
For instance these full color ones, like the Emoji ones, work fine under TextEdit under
Yosemite.
If I were to switch to Pages, and use the old Pages, you can see I drag and drop and
it won't work.
Old Pages won't support that.
The new Pages, however, does support it.