Typing Special Characters on iOS

Posted on March 14, 2013
Filed Under iPhone/iPad | 3 Comments

This 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 & Text ▸ Input Sources. Then you to to the Text tab and create a shortcut (usually I do a semicolon followed by a name or abbreviation). To enter the special character find it in the Character Viewer and double click. It’ll be typed. Now when you type your shortcut, say ;cmd, it’ll be replaced by ⌘. 

It’s not as well known but you can do exactly the same thing in iOS. The only trickier part is getting the special characters since there’s no Character Viewer in iOS. 

IOSShortcutI usually just type them all in some text that is synced with iOS. Say in Pages, Number, Dropbox, Evernote or the like. Once you have them in iOS you just copy each one and make a shortcut. Shortcuts are at Settings ▸ General ▸ Keyboard ▸ Shortcuts. The screen may look slightly different from this one depending upon how many shortcuts you have. (Apple only gives shortcuts their own screen when you have more than five of them)

This tip is also nice for typing names that have accents in them. For instance I created a shortcut for Noël so that the accented e would type right even on my iPhone. It’s also quite useful for typing Greek characters if you converse about mathematics or physics via email, chat, ADN, Twitter or the like.

Related posts:

  1. Typing Special Characters
  2. Text Expansion Problems
  3. Kill the Caps Lock
  4. Special Characters Followup
  5. On iOS Keyboards
  6. iPad Keyboard Tips
  7. Programmer’s Font & Displaying Keys
  8. Copy Finder Selection Paths

Comments

3 Responses to “Typing Special Characters on iOS”

[...] Link. Good technique. Clark. [...]

At least for accented characters, on iOS it’s pretty easy to just hold down the letter to access a popup menu with all the options. Easier to remember than on the Mac actually.

You used to be able to do it on the Mac that way too. I didn’t like it and turned it off and now for the life of me can’t remember how.

I find typing on iOS bad enough that any extra work like that probably isn’t going to happen. That’s why I use shortcuts a lot.

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