Specifications

Character Palette

The Character Palette makes it easy to locate a specific character or symbol on your

system, preview it, and select among its different variations—across all the active fonts

on your system. In addition to providing a view of characters by font (similar to the

preview capability in Font Book), the Character Palette lets you view individual charac-

ters grouped in various categories. You can access the Character Palette in three ways:

• Special Characters. You can display this palette by selecting Special Characters from

the Edit menu in many Panther applications.

• International menu. If you have enabled the Input menu in the International pane

of System Preferences, you’ll see the Character Palette under the flag icon in the

Mac OS X menu bar.

• Font panel menu. You can view the palette by selecting the Characters item from

the Action menu in the lower-left corner of the Font panel.

See the “Character variations” sidebar for one use of the Character Palette.

The Character Palette provides access to individual glyphs.

Choose from several view options.

View Roman fonts by category or by favorites.

Adding a favorite glyph is a one-click operation.

Once you’ve selected a glyph, you can insert it into your document by

double-clicking it, dragging it from the well, or clicking the Insert button.

Choose the font you want to search or limit your options to just the fonts that

contain the glyph you want.

See a preview of the glyph and the glyph’s name.

Technology Tour

Advanced Typography

with Mac OS X

Character variations

This example shows variations of the

Euro symbol.

Keyboard Viewer

Fans of the Key Caps utility in Mac OS 9

will want to try the Keyboard Viewer

in Mac OS X (System Preferences >

International pane > Input Menu).

This handy palette lets you view the

way the keys on your keyboard map

to the characters in each font.

If you need to operate your Mac in a

different language but do not have an

international keyboard, the Keyboard

Viewer makes it easy to enter the

characters you need. It changes its

character base to match the language

you’ve switched to.

Character Palette