The Mac Lawyer Using Macs in Law Firms | Attorney Ben Stevens

How to Insert Characters on the Mac

By J. Benjamin Stevens on Posted in How Do I ... ?, Mac OS X

Do you find yourself getting frustrated when trying to figure out how to insert certain characters (like ⌘, ⌦, §, or ¶) into documents?  I know that I used to – until I learned how to use the Character Palette.  Now this process is very quick and easy.

There are a couple of different ways to access the Character Palette, including (1) press Command, Option/Alt and T together to open it, and (2) go to the Edit menu and choose Special Characters  From there, you simply locate your desired characters and insert them by either clicking "Insert" or dragging the character into your document.

If you find that there are certain characters that you use more frequently, you can add them to your "Favorites" by selecting the character, clicking the "gear" icon on the bottom left, and selecting "Add to Favorites".  Finally, the search window in the bottom right can help you more easily locate certain characters if you need assistance.

You can learn much more about the Character Palette here and here.

 

  • John

    There’s a 3rd way which I’m fond of, because it also gives you easy access to the keyboard viewer, which is quite useful when you want to see how to add international characters such as ü.
    Open System Preferences, go to the Keyboard settings, and check the “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar.”
    A rather odd icon that looks rather like the character viewer will appear in your menu bar near your clock, and you can open either tool from there.

  • Tien

    You could also hold Option and press random keys to see which one you are looking for.
    Option + 6 – §
    Option + 7 – ¶
    Option + Shift + K – 