Mac OS X tricks: typing special characters, made easy.
For those of us who are a bit more tech savvy, it comes natural to rely on keyboard shortcuts, when we need special characters, such as letters featuring foreign accents, and international currency symbols unavailable on a regular keyboard.
The “traditional” way of accessing special characters, typically involves the combination of the Option and Shift key, when pressing a particular character. For instance, the Apple logo can be produced from the combination of Option+Shift+K.
When using frequently the same symbols, it’s easy to remember certain key combinations, however, for those of us who need access to a wider variety of characters, for example when typing paragraphs in foreign languages, looking up every single character’s shortcut, rapidly becomes an inconvenience.
Luckily, text input in Mac OS X, much like in iOS, provides us with a few quick and painless ways to use special characters.
Long-press
When long-pressing any text character on your Mac, a menu pops up, with a choice of different variation of the character selected. For instance, when long-pressing the letter E, a range of options featuring accents and other variations fitting different languages, will appear.
Character viewer
When long-pressing doesn’t return the character we are looking for, the Keyboard Character Viewer comes to the rescue. The helpful feature can be quickly enabled by checking “Keyboard & Character Viewer” in System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources.
Once enabled, we can access the Character Viewer from the menu bar, and simply double click any special character, emoji, icon, math symbols and punctuation, to quickly insert it in our text.
Virtual Keyboard
When enabling the Character Viewer, we also discover access to the Virtual Keyboard, which allows access to several international keyboard layouts we can select from the menu bar.
Trackpad handwriting for Chinese characters
Simplified or traditional Chinese input is a powerful feature in Mac OS X, with support for trackpad handwriting, designed to recognize and extrapolate Chinese symbols, within the selected version of the language. The feature can be enabled by checking “Trackpad Handwriting” in the Input Sources preferences box.
To access trackpad handwriting, we simply press Control+Shift+Space, and use the Macbook’s trackpad to draw the desired character, which will be recognized in real time. A selection of characters suggestions will appear and ready to select and input into our text.
