Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide

Chapter 7. Special Characters

Included with Mac O X is the Keyboard Viewer application, which is a keyboard widget that allows you to see which character is created by applying the Shift, Option, or Shift-Option keys to any key on the keyboard. To enable Keyboard Viewer, go to System Preferences → International → Input Menu, and select the checkbox next to Keyboard Viewer. The Input menu appears in the menu bar; to launch the Keyboard Viewer, simply select this item from the Input menu.

While this application might seem useful, it can be a hassle to launch another app just to create one character and copy and paste it into another program. Fortunately, the Mac OS is able (through one of its least-known and most infrequently used features) to give you the same functionality within any application, making Keyboard Viewer unnecessary if you know what you’re doing.

Table 7-1 lists the special characters. Keep in mind that this doesn’t work for all font types, and some fonts, such as Symbol, Wingdings, and Zapf Dingbats, create an entirely different set of characters or symbols. For example, to create the symbol for the Command key (), you need to switch the font to Wingdings and type a lowercase z.

Table 7-1. Special characters and their key mappings

Normal	Shift	Option	Shift-Option
[a]
1	!	¡	/
2	@	™	€
3	#	£	<
4	$	¢	>
5	%	∞	fi
6	^	§	fl
7	&	¶	‡
8	*	•