Section 74. Type hrcrs

74. Type § § & pound ; h r  c rs

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

2 Find, Launch, and Quit an Application

73 Create a New Text Document

SEE ALSO

108 Change the System's Language

The Macintosh has a history of being especially adept at handling special charactersaccented letters , punctuation marks, mathematical or scientific symbolsin an intuitive and efficient manner. The Option key is what makes this possible; pressing Option along with any of the regular keys either creates a special symbol (such as the copyright symbol, ) or a combining character , which is an entity that combines with the next character you type. For example, to create an accented e ( ), you first press Option+E to create the acute accent combining character ('), one of a large variety of such combining characters ; then you press E again, and the letter combines with the acute accent to create the desired character. After pressing Option+E , you can also press A, I , or any of several other letter keys to get an accented version of that letter.

74. Type § § h r  c rs

Every alphanumeric key on the keyboard is bound to a special Option key character, including a second special character binding that you get if you hold the Shift key as well as the Option key. The bindings are laid out in a carefully planned manner. Rather than making you hunt through a table for special characters or remember symbols by their ASCII number, the Mac is designed to let you memorize the intuitive built-in bindings for immediate access to commonly used symbols. Some key combinations are suggested by the shape of the character, for instance the Japanese yen character ( ), which you get by pressing Option+Y , or the lowercase delta ( ), which is summoned with Option+D . Other bindings are based on the most common usage of a combining diacriticfor instance, the E key generates the acute accent because the acute-accented is so common, and the umlaut ( ) is generated with Option+U ; the tilde diacritic (~) is generated with Option+N because of the common Spanish ± character, but it can also combine to form the Portuguese and µ characters. Still other bindings are suggested, loosely, by the pronunciation of the natural key and the symbol, as with the trademark symbol ( ) which is generated with Option+2 (both "trademark" and "two" start with a similar sound).

It can be interesting to try to figure out the reasoning behind each key binding and to explore what each key does when combined with the Option key; fortunately, however, trial and error isn't the only way to figure out what keys you have to press. There are two input palettes at hand that assist in this investigation: Keyboard Viewer , which gives you a visual map of what each key does, and the Character Palette , which lets you select a character from a comprehensive grid and copy it directly into your document.

1.	Enable the Keyboard Viewer Palette Open the International Preferences pane (click International in the System Preferences , available under the Apple menu). Click the Input Menu tab and then enable the Keyboard Viewer check box. The Keyboard Viewer is now available in the Keyboard Input System Menu, a flag icon among the System Menus on the right side of the Mac's menu bar that indicates the current keyboard layout mode by its displayed icon (a U.S. flag for the standard U.S layout). TIP The Keyboard Viewer can show you a lot of the most commonly used special characters, but to access all the character sets that Mac OS X supports, you must use the Character Palette . Fortunately, most Mac OS X applications that deal with text (such as TextEdit) have a handy option in the Edit menu: click Special Characters to pop up the Character Palette and browse for just the right character.
2.	Determine Key Combinations Select Show Keyboard Viewer from the Keyboard Input System Menu. The palette that appears lets you explore Option -key bindings visually; you can press and hold Option to see what each key's meaning becomes. Press and hold Shift+Option to see the second, alternative meanings of characters already modified by the Shift key. From the Font drop-down list, select a font for the key caps so that you can see exactly what the symbols will look like when you type them. In the Keyboard Viewer palette, combining character keys are indicated in orange; these are the keys you must press along with Option to create a combining character to combine with a regular letter to produce a desired variant on that letter.
3.	Type the Combining Character In a TextEdit window (or in any other application where you can enter text, including changing filenames in the Finder), press the Option key combination you want. For instance, to create a capital O with a circumflex ( ”), press Option+I to invoke the circumflex combining character (^). The symbol appears in your text, highlighted in yellow, to indicate that the next character you typeif such a combined character existswill be combined with the circumflex to create an accented character. NOTE For symbols that don't require a combining character, such as the c with cedilla ( §), pressing the correct Option key combination creates the character immediately, and you can continue typing without having to press a second key to create the special character.
4.	Type the Standard Character to Combine Press the key that creates the "standard" version of the character to combine with the combining character. For instance, press O to enter a lowercase o , or press Shift+O to enter a capital O . The character combines with the preceding circumflex to form the desired character, ” . You can now continue typing as usual. The same procedure can be used to create any common accented character. For example, to create the ‚ character, press Option+I , then A . To create , press Option+U , then Shift+U .
5.	Enable the Character Palette If you're having difficulty using the Keyboard Viewer (some people have trouble translating the special characters shown there to the correct key on their physical keyboard, and many special characters aren't available as standard key bindings), you can insert special characters into your text by using the Character Palette . You might have to do more scrolling in the Character Palette window than in the Keyboard Viewer , but the Character Palette lets you see exactly what you're selecting. Open the International Preferences pane (click International in the System Preferences application). Click the Input Menu tab and then select the Character Palette check box to add it to the listing under the Keyboard Input System Menu, if it is not already enabled.
6.	Select Special Characters Click the Keyboard Input System Menu icon and choose Show Character Palette . All characters in the vast Unicode spectrum are available in this palette. From the View menu at the top of the palette, select the class of characters you want (such as Roman ); depending on which class you select, a variety of different organizing categories are available. (For instance, select Japanese from the View menu if you want to browse characters by radical , by category, or by code table.) Every class lets you browse by Category (click that tab near the top of the palette) or by Favorites , which are characters that you use often (use the Add to Favorites button to add a character to your Favorites list). Browse until you find the character you want; then either double-click it or select it and click Insert to copy the character into your current document.