Stupid Simple Mac Tips #25 – Discover the Allure of Exotic Characters
There is nothing worse than when you are putting together a document that necessitates a special character. Whether it is an accent or the symbol for a different currency, it may come up, and you do not want to waste time looking, on Google, for example, to clunkily copy and paste.
Do not fret if you run into one of these exotic characters.
Today’s Stupid Simple Mac Tips will show how you can type these characters on a Mac through various keyboard combinations and other tricks.
How to do Accents
One feature on a Mac allows you to streamline the character accessing process in your document without needing to manually insert them through a multitude of menus.
Start by holding down the relevant character key that requires an accent. From there, a small menu will appear for the letter. It will indicate what to press to enter a special character.
A common example is creating the é character by holding down the E-key while pressing the 2-key to insert a given character.
Conversely, you can click your desired character or cycle through options with the arrow keys.
You can also use the return key to choose a character.
Some special characters are not available through the long-press method. For these instances, OS X provides the Keyboard and Character Viewers that allow you to choose and insert individual special characters.
Accessing either of these two viewers necessitates your enabling of the ‘Menu bar’ shortcut:
Do so by clicking on the Apple menu in the menu bar.
Lastly, navigate to ‘System Preferences’> ‘Keyboard> ‘Input Sources’ before selecting the ‘Show Input Menu in Menu Bar’ Viewer tick-box. Now you are able to access “Emoji and Symbols” using the Menu Bar! (Edit>Emoji and Symbols)
Now, these exotic characters do not seem so complicated, do they?
