Typing Special Characters

Posted on January 10, 2013
Filed Under System | 6 Comments

I thought I’d posted a hint on this before, but I don’t see it anywhere. If there are special unicode characters you want to type a lot an old trick is to turn on the Character Pallet. Go to Language & Text pref pane in System Preferences, go to the Input Sources tab and click the checkmark beside Keyboard & Character Viewer. It’ll appear in your menu bar. If you haven’t turned this on you should.

Once you find the character you want you probably don’t want to have to bring up the character viewer each time. Click on the Text tab in the pref pane. Apple has a very simple text substitution system akin to TextExpander or Quickeys. It doesn’t handle macros but it will replace any string with an other string. It’s useful for common misspellings like “teh” or the like. It also handles displaying unicode fractions so 1/4 becomes ¼. What I use if for though are other special characters I want to type.

Here’s my list of special characters.

Replacements

I don’t have a lot. My complex ones I typically do in Quickeys so I can do things like insert the date. I follow the standard that special substitutions start with a semi-colon as you’re not apt to start a word with a semi-colon.

I love being able to type ⌘S in a chat or ADN window for instance. Since I’m using caps lock as a meta key I guess I better add that now.

Related posts:

  1. Programmer’s Font & Displaying Keys
  2. Abusing Emoji
  3. CharTyper
  4. MarsEdit, Safari and the Ragged Left
  5. Unicode Lookup
  6. Displaying a SalesForce Contact’s Emails in Mail
  7. More On ADN
  8. Type Tomorrow’s Date

Comments

6 Responses to “Typing Special Characters”

I’ve been meaning to do this. And to also include HTML entities which I have need of typing frequently.

[...] Clark Goble: [...]

[...] Link. Clever use of semicolon prefixed substitutions. [...]

[...] is a bit of a followup to last week’s special characters post. Back in the earlier days of this blog I tried to follow Betalogue’s style of representing [...]

[...] Tsai had some comments on my post about typing special characters using the Keyboard Pref Pane. He mentioned that it worked inconsistently for him. I was surprised [...]

[...] is a followup to my post from January on typing special characters in OSX. Basically you enable the Keyboard & Character Viewer from System Preferences ▶ Language [...]

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