Forget Keycaps there’s a new kid in town
mijlee (501 pencils) | Tue, 2005-08-16 09:23
I've heard the odd person moaning that Apple no longer include Keycaps in their new all singing all dancing OS. This just isn't true, like a lot of things in OS X you just need to know where to look.
If you open up the International settings in System Prefs you should switch on 2 options in the 'input menu' tab; Character Palette and Keyboard viewer.
Keyboard Viewer is basically a porting of Keycaps and has no extra functions that I can see. So if this all you want there you go all yours.
Character Palette however is something new and it blew my mind when i discovered it's power a couple of months ago. Basically it is a way to access every glyph available on your system and there are a multitude of ways of getting to the right character.
Glyph view
This gives you the full set of characters for each font. If it is a basic PS font you obviously only get what is available to you. If it's an OpenType or Dfont you get the expanded set.
Unicode
An expansive navigation system for looking through every possible glyph in dozens of languages. All categorised, you can then see which fonts have the glyph you have selected
Alphabet
This splits everything up into all of the installed Alphabets and only shows you glyphs relevant to that set. My machine has Roman, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Simplified Chinese.
I think you'll find it way more usefull than Keycaps or popChar ever was.
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http://mijlee.com
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People have been talking about this feature since OSX was released nearly 5 years ago. Where have you been... buried in a pile of Creative Annuals? ;-P
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Actually, there is one thing that's a noticeable improvement in Tiger. The Character Palatte is available as the last item in the Edit menu of most applications. (It's listed as "Special Characters.") So you don't have to take up menu bar space with international keyboard support.
Thanks mijlee!
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Goo
Why clutter your menu bar when you can run the applications directly?
/System/Library/Components/KeyboardViewer.component/Contents/
SharedSupport/KeyboardViewerServer.app
/System/Library/Components/CharacterPalette.component/Contents/
SharedSupport/CharPaletteServer.app
Set up abbreviations for these two apps in Butler (or Quicksilver, or whatever), and Bob's your uncle.
I found the files, but when I double click them it asks for an application to open them. How can I run them? Can I not run them without Butler or Quicksilver?
I was able to run them directly from the Dock in Panther?
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http://mijlee.com
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I found it within the first week of getting my copy of Panther but never used it professionally until a couple of months ago. I was doing a large multilingual job and it saved my neck by making the corrections process much easier.
The reason I posted it here was mostly because I have heard a few people winging that Keycaps no longer exists, when it actually is there along with this souped up version. Just trying to help out JimD and maybe even make sound a little more exciting than it actually is ;)
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http://mijlee.com
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