Typing Special Characters Using Unicode On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let me show you how you use Unicode codes to type special characters on your Mac.

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So what are Unicode characters. Well all characters are unicode characters. But if you're saying Unicode character that probably means you want to be able to type a special character using the four or more digit code for that character. You can do that on your Mac if you set some things up first.

There are tons of special characters. Most apply to characters in different languages. There are tons of symbols used for different purposes as well. Most of the time, for most users, you're not even going to worry about the Unicode character. You're going to simply type Control Command Space and then it brings up the Character Finder here. You can scroll through it to find the character you want. Of you can type a character's name. For instance if I type the word equal I can see all sorts of special symbols that have to do with that including, say, an approximation symbol or not equals. That kind of thing. I can just select it and it will type it for me.

Sometime, especially if you're in a technical profession, you want to actually be able to type the special Unicode character code. You can do that on your Mac. The way to do that is first to go to the Apple menu, then System Preferences, and then Keyboard. Here you want to add a new Input Source. So you have an Input Source of public domain keyboard that you're using, in the case the US standard keyboard. I want to hit Plus to add another keyboard. Scroll all the way to the bottom and there's one called Others and there is a Unicode Hex Input keyboard. I'm going to add that and now I have two keyboards, US and Unicode. You also want to make sure it turns on Show Input Menu in Menu Bar. You see that here with symbols for each of the keyboards. So US keyboard and Unicode Hex Input keyboard. 

Now I can switch to this special keyboard here and the first thing I'll notice is that most of the time it just works like a regular keyboard. I can type just regular words. But I can also type these special characters.  So, for instance, I can hold the Option key down and press 2248 and I get the approximation symbol and that is Unicode character 2248. 

Now how can you find these characters? Well there's several ways. One is to simply go to the webpage for the list of Unicode characters at Wikipedia. There are more than 137,000 characters. So not all of them are listed here just a lot of them. So you can go and look through this and see lots of different characters for different languages, for special functions like here are all the mathematical symbols for instance. There are tons of other things as well. So you find a character that you want to type, like for instance here is the looped square which is useful because you see that on the Mac keyboard. So somebody like me might need to type that every once in awhile. I can see that it is character 2318. So here in TextEdit or Mail or Pages or wherever you are I just do Option 2318 and there is that special character.

Now another way for you to find special symbols is Command Control Space and bring up the Character Viewer. Once you're there click on this button here and that takes you to the Character Viewer where you can customize what appears. So go to Customize List there, scroll to the bottom and there's Code Tables. Open that up and then click on Unicode. Hit Done. You'll see Unicode here. 

Click on that and you'll be able to actually browse all the different Unicode characters and also search for them. Like, for instance for clef, and I come up with the musical notation symbol for clef. Actually a couple of them. I can select this one here and I'll see Unicode symbol there. There's another Unicode symbol. Now this brings up an interesting problem. This symbol here is actually a five character Unicode symbol. How do you type that because after you type the first four characters it's going to put whatever character corresponds to those four and it's not going to pay attention to that last digit there. In this case 1D11E. It's not going to care about the E and I'm not going to get the clef character.

So what do you do? Well it turns out there is a way to do it. It's not easy but if you have a special character you want to type you can find it by going to a site called FileFormat.Info. Once you're at FileFormat.Info you can search for what you want. So search for clef here and it will come up with Unicode character for clef. You go into that and you can see here that not only do you get all the different representations, like for instance the regular UTF character here which we can't type, but we see something called UTF-16. UTF-16 in hex is this which is a lot to type but it does work. So if I were to go here and I wanted to type clef hold the Option key down and type d834dd1e and I get clef. Notice that after four characters it actually started to add that character there but as I kept typing it replaced it once I got to eight characters. So you can still do any Unicode character you want. But sometimes you're going to have to look up the UTF-16 version of it.

Now this seems like a lot. Well, you're only really need to do it once because you can actually then create a shortcut for this. For instance I'm going to go System Preferences and Keyboard and then go to Text. I'm going to add one here with the Plus symbol. This will be something like clefchar. It should be something you never type as a real work. Then over here I will do Option d834dd1e. I get the clef symbol there. Hit return to accept and then I will exit there. Now I will type clefchar and you see it wants to replace right away with that. All I do is hit the spacebar or return and it will actually do it. So you can create shortcuts for the characters that you use a lot.

It also might be a pain to switch between the two keyboards by clicking here all the time. Well there's a shortcut for that as well. You go into System Preferences, Keyboard, and then this time Shortcuts. Look under Input Sources and you can see there's a shortcut, Control Space, to go to the next input source or Control Option Space to go to the previous one. So watch this symbol up here if I do Control Space. You can see it switches to the US keyboard. Control Space switches to the Unicode keyboard. If you hold the Control key down and tap Space and wait you will actually get a list of your keyboards. You can select one or just keep hitting space to go between them and then release the Control key to select that keyboard.

So one of the advantages to typing Unicode Characters like this is that you get the complete set because sometimes some characters don't appear in the Character Finder. Other times they're there but you have to search for the particular name of the character according to Apple. It's easier to search online for a character sometimes. Come up with that Unicode Character and then type it in this way than it is to find it in the Character Finder. Of course if you find it online typically they show the character there right on the webpage and you can select it, copy it, and paste it into your document. So keep that in mind if you want a special character but you don't want to add this keyboard and then manually type in the four or eight digit code.