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LOCATION: Basic Setup » Non-English Keyboards » Macintosh OS X

Character Palette in Macintosh OS X

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Apple provides a Character Palette utility which allows users to look up and insert individual characters. Once it is installed, users can enter symbols for math, East Asian languages and other scripts.

Note: Some older applications may not support this utility, but it is available in Office 2004/2008, Text Edit, Adobe products, Dreamweaver MX 2004, and others.

This Page

  1. Activate the Character Palette
  2. Insert Math and Punctuation Symbols
  3. East Asian Characters
  4. Other Scripts

Activate Character Palette

The Character Palette can be used to insert characters into applications such as TextEdit; however not all characters can be inserted into all applications.
Note: The Unicode Character Input Palette is not available in 10.1.

  1. Go to the Apple menu and open Systems Preferences.
  2. Click the International icon (U.N. flag) on the first row of the Systems Preferences panel.
    Note: The panel may differ between different versions of the operating system.
    .System Preferences Screen capture

  3. Click the Keyboard Menu (OS X 10.2) or the Input Menu (OS X 10.3) tab and check off the option for the Character Palette then close the window.
    Input Menu
    Check "Character Palette" to activate.

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Insert Math and Punctuation Symbols

  1. Open an application such as Office 2004, Text Edit or other application which supports Unicode input.
  2. Choose Show Character Palette from the International (flag icon) menu on the upper right.
  3. In the new window, switch the View drop-down menu to Roman.
  4. Select Math in the left menu to display available math symbols.
  5. Highlight the symbol needed, then drag the symbol into the document or click Insert.
  6. To insert other types of symbols such as Greek letters, click on the right hand menu to reveal the list of characters. Highlight and Insert as in Step #3.
  7. To view addtional math symbols, switch the View menu in the upper left to Unicode (or All Characters in Leopard), then scroll to Mathematical Operators on the left.

Character Palette, Default View
Character Palette - Highlight character, then click Insert.

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East Asian Characters

  1. Open an application such as Office 2004, Text Edit or other application which supports Unicode input.
  2. Choose Show Character Palette from the International (flag icon) menu on the upper right.
  3. In the View menu in the upper left, choose Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese to reveal character options
  4. Click the By Radical tab at the top to select Chinese characters by shape
  5. Click the By Category tab to select non-Chinese characters including katagana, hiragana and hangul.
  6. Highlight the symbol needed, then click Insert.

Character Palette, Chinese, By Radical
Character Palette showing Chinese.

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Other Scripts

Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5)

  1. Open an application such as Office 2004, Text Edit or other application which supports Unicode input.
  2. Choose Show Character Palette from the International (flag icon) menu on the upper right.
  3. In the View menu in the upper left, choose All Characters to reveal character options.
  4. In the left menu, scroll down to the appropriate region for your target script. Click the arrow then select a script.
  5. Highlight the symbol needed, then click Insert.

 

Character Palette Screen Capture
Tiger Character Palette (10.4) with scripts organized by region.

Panther (10.3) and Jaguar (10.2)

  1. Open an application such as Office 2004, Text Edit or other application which supports Unicode input.
  2. Choose Show Character Palette from the International (flag icon) menu on the upper right.
  3. In the View menu in the upper left, choose Unicode or All to reveal character options.
  4. In the left menu, scroll down to the script block desired.
  5. Highlight the symbol needed, then click Insert.

 

Panther Screencapture
Panther Character Palette (10.3)

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This Web page maintained by Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).
Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.

Last Modified: Friday, 27-Jun-2008 16:24:59 EDT