Keycaps

Keycaps
Mac Tip#61/26-June-2002

A client recently asked me about typing some unusual characters. In her case she wanted some characters used in Spanish, like ¿ and ¡. (The first is an upside down ? and the second an upside down !.) Others have wanted French or German characters such as the acute or grave accents or the umlaut. Still others would like to be able to type small icons such as a picture of an envelope or a car or a knife and fork.

Note: here in New Zealand we often want to use the Maori macron ¯, but unfortunately that’s a whole other problem.

The Mac has been able to do these things for a very long time, but one problem is that people didn’t know how. That’s where Key Caps can help. You’ll find it under the Apple Menu on OS 9 and earlier and in the Utilities folder (in the Applications folder) under OS X.

First open your word processor and check which Font you’re using. Now open Key Caps and from the Font menu choose the same font.

Key Caps shows you a text area and a simulation of a computer keyboard. Press down the Shift key and see how the keyboard now changes the letters to upper case. Now try holding down the Option key instead of the Shift key and you’ll see various interesting characters appear. With my font set to Verdana Regular and under OS X I can now see various European accents such as the grave and acute, umlaut etc, along with a range of other interesting symbols such as copyright.

If I hold down Option and Shift this changes again. Some uppercase letters appear and some symbols change completely. If I now change to another font such as Geneva results are similar but not identical.

There are several special fonts too. Try out Wingdings, Webdings or Zapf Dingbats if you have them. Now you’ll find a wonderful array of trucks and rocketships, arrows and curlicues, speech bubbles, snowflakes and more.

To use these characters note which key combination produces the one you want and go back to your wordprocessor. Change the font and type the key combination. Some characters will look better at a different size too.

Now you can happily print your document and all should be well. Don’t try doing this in the body of an email though, unless it’s as an experiment as there are enormous complexities in how different computers handle such things. It also might not work so well if you’ll be sending the wordprocessing document to another person (for example as an email attachment). By all means, give it a try, but don’t rely on it.

Tagged as: characters, languages, macrons, umlauts, Webdings, Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats

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