Filed under: Mac 101
Mac 101: Input Menu and keyboard layouts
OS X has a lot of nice features for "International" users that many folks forget are there, even though some of them are handy for US English users as well. Among these are the many available keyboard layouts in the Input Menu tab of the International System Preference Pane. The Input Menu is designed primarily to give you access to foreign language keyboard layouts which remap your Roman character keys to specialized glyph sets in both Roman and non-Roman languages (e.g. Cyrillic and Asian languages, etc.). In addition to the non-English language support, however, there are other useful things such as support for the Dvorak keyboard layout. Perhaps best of all, by checking the "Show input menu in menu bar" option (see the image after the jump) you get one click access to whichever language layouts you select in the Preference Pane, as well as the Character Palette (for finding obscure symbols and glyphs) and the Keyboard Viewer (which will place a clickable keyboard on your screen). This will place a small flag in your menu bar which will indicate which key layout is active, and when you click on it you'll be able to select from among the available key layouts selected in the Input Menu tab. If you ever have to write in a foreign language using an appropriate key layout can save a lot of time for tying special characters like macra in Latin and breathings and accents in Greek. And if you want to get a little bit adventurous you can even make custom key layouts of your own.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Wevah said 8:48AM on 5-08-2007
It should be noted that one can type a macron over letters by using the "US Extended" keyboard layout and typing Option-A followed by the appropriate letter.
Reply
eric f. said 9:25AM on 5-08-2007
I knew that keyboard was still around somewhere! now I finally know what the Flag menu is for...doh.
Reply
Ken Martin said 2:40PM on 5-08-2007
I just thought I'd offer an instructional post I did recently concerning exactly this; specifically, being able to type Polytonic Greek on a Mac. There's also a PDF cheat sheet for the keystrokes.
http://www.kpmartin.com/2007/04/06/typing-greek-letters-on-the-mac/
Reply
Austin said 3:24PM on 5-08-2007
Not to get off topic, but what's the program in the menu bar next to the language tab? The one that monitors the amount of upload/download bandwidth?
Reply
Austin said 3:24PM on 5-08-2007
Oh yeah, and how did you add the date next to the time and the weekday?
Reply
Mat Lu said 3:31PM on 5-08-2007
@Austin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mathewlu/435563725/
Reply
Miharu said 9:56AM on 5-15-2007
I like using OS X very much mainly because of how easy it is to change language. I use four keyboard inputs, Finnish, simplified Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Using apple + space to change language.
On Windows it's harder and doesn't even work always, and on Linux I don't know if it's possible at all (at least I couldn't do it).
Reply