character map

[Grant Barrett]

In OS X, there's a character palette available in the International
System Preference panel. Choose the Input Menu tab there, and you
should see it as the first option among the keyboard layouts. Click the
box next to it to turn it on. This will add a little keyboard layout
menu to your menu bar (in the US as a little American flag icon), where
it will always be available. When you choose it, it brings up a neatly
organized resizable window which will float on top of the document you
are working on.

It's particularly useful when choosing from a large Unicode font, as it
groups the characters into scripts (Basic Latin, IPA Extensions,
Phonetic Extensions, Cyrillic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hangul, Cherokee, and
many others) and will let you see if the character you want is
available in a particular font. You can then insert it directly into
your document with a button-click, or copy and paste it where you like.

Grant

On Jan 3, 2004, at 22:07, sagehen wrote:

> Dave Wilton writes:
> Windows has a useful function called "Character Map." You can find it
> under
> Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools. It lists all the characters
> for all
> the fonts installed on your machine. It gives you ready access to any
> number
> of useful symbols, like ¢ © ë ð. It's not as handy as having them on
> the
> keyboard itself, but for infrequently used symbols it's a good tool.
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> Macs have this function, also, accessed by Command-Option-Q, for
> whatever
> font happens to be being used.  The existence of the character set
> doesn't
> necessarily mean that email will carry them unchanged.  I think only
> those
> with ASCII codes under 170-something can be counted on to remain
> consistent.
> Mark Mandel once described them on this list as being limited to those
> that
> appeared on the standard typewriter keyboard.
> A. Murie
>
> --
>