Special Characters

You can place many special characters in text documents by holding down the Option key and pressing various other keys, but this doesn’t help much if you don’t happen to recall that pressing Option-R will get you the ® symbol. There is actually a large array of characters that you can get by pressing different combinations of keystrokes, but Apple’s Character Palette is a much easier way to get to them.

Once the Character Palette is open, you can browse through sets of special characters like Currency Symbols, Arrows, Math, Greek, etc, and you will see a pane that displays all of your options within each category. Once you find a symbol you want to use, you can simply click on it, then click the “Insert” button at the bottom of the window to insert it into the document you’re currently working on.

The Character Palette is not exactly obvious to locate, but you can find several different ways (all except one of these techniques will work in both Tiger and Leopard).

1) If you are in a text editing application that will allow you to open the “Fonts” window (in many applications, this is Command-T), you can open the Character Palette by selecting “Characters…” from the cog button:

2) As of Leopard, if you are in a text editing application, you can click the “Help” menu and type “Special Characters” to find out where it’s hiding (you probably won’t even need to finish typing the phrase before it will find the special characters help for you!). There happens to be a menu item for Special Characters in Pages, but if there isn’t the Help menu should be able to tell you where to find it if it’s available in that application.

For example, in Pages you can hover over the “Special Characters” item in the help menu, and it will open the “Edit” menu and put a big old arrow on the screen next to “Special Characters…” to show you where the menu option is. (I did not doctor this screenshot other than to cut it down to size- in Leopard, the help menu now points out where things are if you ask!)

3) If you have a flag symbol in your Menu Bar at the top of the screen, you can simply choose “Show Character Palette” to pop the window open.

This flag symbol is generally only visible if you’ve enabled multiple language support on your computer. If you’d like to do this so that you can always easily access the character palette (even if you don’t need your computer to speak multiple languages!), you can open up System Preferences, click “International” and select the “Input Menu” tab. From here, you can select both “Show input menu in menu bar” and check the box to turn Character Palette “On.” From now on, you can just pull up the Character Palette in any application by selecting it from the “flag” menu in the menu bar.