The Character Palette (Figure 53 ) enables you to type any character in any language for which a font is installed in your computer, including Asian and eastern European languages. It is especially useful for typing special characters, like mathematical symbols, arrows, and dingbats characters.
The Character Palette is available in some Mac OS X applications, including TextEdit. Once displayed, any character you click is inserted in the current document, at the insertion point.
Although you can enter foreign language characters into documents on your Macintosh, those characters may not appear properly when your documents are viewed on other computers.
The Font panel is only available in Carbon and Cocoa applicationsthose written to take advantage of Apple-created libraries of code. That's why you'll find the Font panel in only some applications.
In TextEdit, choose Edit > Special Characters (Figure 53 ). The Character Palette appears (Figure 54 ).
1. | In a document window, position the insertion point where you want the character to appear. |
2. | Display the Character Palette (Figure 54 ). |
3. | Choose a character group from the View pop-up menu (Figure 55 ). The window may change to offer different options (Figure 56 ). Figure 55. Use this pop-up menu to choose the characters to view.Figure 56. When you choose an option from the View pop-up menu, the options in the Character Palette change. |
4. | Click a button above the scrolling lists to view characters in a specific order. |
5. | Select one of the options in the left scrolling list. |
6. | Select one of the characters in the right scrolling list. |
7. | Click Insert. The character is inserted at the insertion point in your document. |
To display information about the selected character, click the triangle beside Character Info to reveal it (Figure 57 ).
To specify a font for the character, click the triangle beside Font Variation to display the character in multiple fonts. You can then click the character in the font you want.