The (Hidden) Glyphs Palette

Fonts contain all sorts of characters — also called glyphs — that you may not actually be able to type on your keyboard, such as ornaments, fraction characters, and letters for foreign languages. Fortunately, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and QuarkXPress 7 all offer a glyph palette that lets you display every character in a font. But Photoshop users who want special characters shouldn’t feel left out in the cold! Mac OS X offers its own glyphs palette — called the Character Palette — which gives all users the same features and even some additional options that InDesign and QuarkXPress users will want to use.

Finding the Character Palette

In order to use the Character Palette, you must first enable it.

Step 1: Open System Preferences and click on the International icon.

Step 2: Click on the Input Menu panel and turn on the Character Palette checkbox

Step 3: Now close System Preferences. You should now have a flag icon in your menu bar representing your current keyboard country.

Step 4: Choose Show Character Palette from this menu to display the palette. It will float on top of whatever application you currently have open.

Next Page: Finding the Character You Want

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