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Accents & The Keyboard Viewer

Started by brentspore · 9 months ago

Guest Article By: Jon Deal
The Mac has always been known for it’s excellent typographical ability and agility. Macs have had proportional fonts since the beginning and having a large set of professionally designed fonts was one of the reasons Desktop Publishing took off back in th ... Continue reading »

5 comments

  • 2BFrank

    2 years ago

    Nice, didn't know that! But the € symbol is Option + 2 and the ™ symbol shift + Option + 2?
    reply
  • zuhl

    2 years ago

    2BFrank--

    I wonder if maybe you are using a different Keyboard configuration? Something non-English or non-QWERTY?

    Which brings up a good point, perhaps I shouldn't have been so US-centric! Different Keyboard layouts (switch-able via the International Input menu and preference pane) might yield different key combos. Doh! Bad American!

    But definitely with the US keyboard selected, Option + 2 is ™ and Shift + Option + 2 is €.

    Thanks!
    reply
  • 2BFrank

    2 years ago

    Ah, yes... it's the standard QWERTY keyboard, but with the Dutch input...

    We use the € a lot more than ™ I guess.
    reply
  • robin

    1 year ago

    "The easiest way to figure out umlauts, accents, tilde and carat-ed characters is to open up the “Keyboard Viewer” palette. Sadly, it is buried in the “International” System Preference Pane."

    Yeah, that is annoying when you're using that little keyboard all the time. Same thing for the "character palette", too. So annoying that I googled around to see if someone had figured out a shortcut... and I found one :)
    The folks at macosxhints have 2 neat little scripts that you can download. You can save each of them as applications, which you then use to open the Keyboard Viewer or the Character Palette.

    Now all those scripts are doing is open a hidden file in the System Folder. So I thought, maybe I can find that file and open it directly instead of going through a script and save a few seconds.
    And yeah, it's as simple as that: you just have to navigate the path the script follows.
    For the Keyboard viewer- System:Library:Components:KeyboardViewer.component:Contents:SharedSupport:KeyboardViewerServer

    For the character palette- System:Library:Components:CharacterPalette.component:Contents:SharedSupport:CharPaletteServer

    When you get to the .component file, ctrl-click and select "Show package contents" , then keep going.
    When you get to the final file (it's an application), just make an alias of it by holding command+option and dropping it on the desktop or something. There you go, a convenient shortcut that gives you that keyboard instantly!

    The second method is easier and faster, it works great on Leopard, but I don't know about earlier systems. Doesn't hurt to try, it won't crash any computer.
    reply
  • Jeremy Crandell

    8 months ago

    You can make the Keyboard Viewer and Character Palettes readily available in the menu bar by going to:

    System Preferences > International >Input Menu

    You can then select, via checkbox, Character Pallete and Keyboard Viewer.
    At the bottom of the pane you'll see another checkbox titled "Show input menu in menu bar"
    reply

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