New to Mac / Switcher Tips: How to Input Any Character

Back in the pre-OS X days there used to be a great little program called PopChar that placed a little ’p’ in the corner of your screen. All you had to do was click on that little ’p’ to pull up a menu of all the specialized characters you might want to include in a document, like foreign characters, accents, and umlauts. There’s even a new version for OS X, called PopChar X ($29.95), if you used to use PopChar and really want it back again. However, if you’d rather save your money, there is an easy way to have virtually the same functionality in OS X for free: the Character Palette.

In order to access the Character Palette, you have to go to System Preferences and click on the International control panel. Click on the Input Menu tab and check the box next to Show input menu in the menu bar. Then make sure that you have checked the box next to Character Palette (and whatever other keyboard layouts you may like to use).

Now, assuming you are using the default American keyboard layout, any time you want to add a special character into a text document, simply click on the American flag in the menu bar at the top of the screen, and select Show Character Palette from the drop-down menu. You can browse through every possible character that your OS X installation supports. Once you find the character you are looking for, simply highlight it by clicking on it and then click the Insert button. If it is a character you think you will use frequently, then click on the Add to Favorites button so that you can find it more easily next time. Have fun!