What Keys Give Me What Symbols On the Mac?

So I'm making up this questionnaire this week and I want some nice boxes to start of the questions like bullets, but I forget what font and keys give me those symbols. Since I'm a designer, I know it's in one of the Dingbat font families, but I can never remember which one because I don't use them often enough.

In the old Mac systems before OS X 10.3, there was an awesome Desk Accessory (now called widgets. Yes, Apple was there first.) called Keycaps. It was a little onscreen keyboard where the keys showed you what symbol they would make under various combinations and fonts.

Now I remember that these days it has been replaced with Keyboard Viewer, but it's more limited and hard to find. Is it in Applications? Nope. Utilities? Nope. Dashboard? Nope. Spotlight? Nope. WTF? Why would Apple make this utility so hard to find?

So how do you get the Keyboard Viewer? Here's the deal: Open System Preferences and select International (you know, that one you've never opened before.) Hit the Input Menu tab. Now look down to the bottom and check the Show Input Menu in Menu Bar box. Now go up and check the Keyboard Viewer Box and while you are at it check the Character Palette box. Now look for the little flag up in the menu bar next to the time. Click that and select Show Keyboard Viewer. Now it should pop up.

Are you kidding me?!! Is this really the Mac OS? Has Steve seen this? Yikes.

OK, so Keyboard Viewer gets you what you see above. The pull down menu shows only a couple different fonts: Standard, Webdings, Wingdings 1, 2 and 3 plus Monotype Sorts. I find this is the most handy way of seeing what key gives you what symbol.

If what you are looking for is just the Standard fonts, check out CharacterPal, a Dashboard widget that will tell you what key gives you standard symbols like the copyright © or Euro €. This type of easy access is what Apple should be shooting for.

But what about all the cool symbols that go with various other font types? In this case, you may want to check out the Character Palette. You can find this in the same way as the Keyboard Viewer, or if you are using an application that uses the Apple Fonts palette, you can find it buried under the Gear (Action?) menu.

With the Character Palette, you can browse characters by type such as Currency Symbols or Accented Latin, but there is no way to correlate which keys in which fonts get you there. The option you should use instead is finding what you want and then hitting the Insert button.

Now you could use Font Book to see all the characters in a font, but there is no clue as to what keys give you which ones.

Seriously, someone must handle all this for Jobs, or there would be more heads on the walls around Apple HQ.

OK widget designers out there, there is a hole to fill here. Please create a widget that looks like a keyboard, has a menu that lists all the installed fonts and the keys show the symbol created like Keyboard Viewer does. You could call it, I don't know… KeyCaps?


How have you solved this problem? Any tips to share or shareware apps that we are not aware of? Let us know in the Comments section below.

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