Special tools to enter special characters?

Ralf

In part as research for a book, in part out of pure curiosity:
How do you guys typically input special characters which either have no shortcut in your current layout or one you might not know?
(I might set up an online survey for this later, but I want to make sure I know all the options first.)

Do you frequently use character palettes other than PopChar or the standard Windows/Mac OS character palettes? Which ones?
Have you set up text replacement tools to input frequently used special characters easily? How are they set up?
Is anyone actually using Unicode Hex input codes or any other special keyboard layouts?

Chris Lozos

I typically use the Adobe Glyph Palette but when typing Greek, I switch to the Greek keyboard.

Georg Seifert

I use the UnicodeChecker. It allowes you to search for Unicode hex value and description.

Jan Schmoeger

Glyph palette in CS, "Edit/Special Characters" elsewhere (Mac OSX).

PabloImpallari

Copy/paste from http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/trivia/character-entities.html

J_Tillman

I just switched to PopChar, but I used BabelMap for a long time.
http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html

Max Phillips

Adobe Glyph Palette.

Ermin Međedović

Popchar mostly. Adobe glyph palette.

Stephen Coles

I enjoy the new feature in OS X (Mountain Lion?) which lets you hit-and-hold a key and see related accented characters.

But maybe you mean characters that are even more special. In that case, "Edit" menu > "Special Characters…"

Ben Blom

Copy the Unicode value from FontLab’s Glyph Properties panel. Open the Symbol window in MS Word, and paste the Unicode value in the Character code box.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

If I need a certain Unicode Range more often, I make my own keyboard layout. Quick and easy with Ukelele. I have set up one that allows me to cover pretty much all Latin characters, including combining accents.

… plus the aforementioned UnicodeChecker and OSX Special Characters palette.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

I use the Unicode Hex keyboard on OS X, the Alt+X on Richedit Windows applications and the Ctrl+Shift+U in GTK+ applications but that requires knowing code points. If I don’t know that I use Ishida’s UniView Lite web tool or Unicode Checker.

David Sudweeks

If it's a standard character and I have a browser open, searching the internet is usually just as fast or faster than opening a glyph/character palette/map. Of course type people often have the advantage of knowing the names of the characters they're looking for.

Florian Hardwig

PopChar is still my go-to tool for that. Additionally, I have set up a number of text replacement shortcuts for stuff that I need on a frequent base.
For more obscure characters, a web search (+ copy and paste) works best, just like David wrote. Often I end up on fileformat.info. Another good site is graphemica.com. Similar sites that I haven’t used much include unicode-table.com and unicodelookup.com. copypastecharacter.com is too reduced for my needs. Ugly and sometimes buggy, but great if you need to search visually: shapecatcher.com

Sandy Cerovich

The problem with PopChar is that it has a tendency not to find characters that don't have assigned unicode numbers.

John Hudson

The problem with PopChar is that it has a tendency not to find characters that don't have assigned unicode numbers.

You mean glyphs that don't have assigned codepoints. A character is, by definition, an encoded entity.

Sandy Cerovich

I meant a mark or symbol used in a writing system...such as "A" or "B".

John Hudson

Well, those are obviously characters, and I assume PopChar presents them. Can you give an example of the kind of 'mark or symbol' that PopChar doesn't present?

Viktor Suszter

May be, this is not, what you find, but i use it for checking extra characters:-) http://urtd.net/projects/cod/

Kent Lew

[Jackson, James, or Ramiro — The post from xants2355 (9/27 7:24am) looks suspicious to me. Please check. Forgive me if I’m wrong.]

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

Kent, that link points to Ondrej Jób's Context of Diacritics site.

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

@xants2355, Please change your user name to your real first and last name (see: http://typedrawers.com/discussion/264/typedrawers-is-a-real-names-only-forum for rules).

Kent Lew

Oh right, Jackson. Sorry. I misread the domain and got a bad google result when inspecting myself. My mistake. Very embarrassed. (:-p

John Hudson

You can change your flag setting for Viktor's post, I think, Kent.

Kent Lew

Yes, right. Thanks, John. Done. Again, my apologies to Viktor.

Ralf

By the way: I noticed, that the text replacements, set up in the Mac OS X system settings, are suggested on iOS as well, probably linked through iCloud.

Does anyone know more about this feature? In which versions of iOS and Mac OS is that supported? Is there a setting somewhere to turn this on and off?
I find this extremely useful. I know there are additional keyboards and apps for copying special characters, but simply typing your Mac OS X codes makes it so much simpler and faster.

Jan Willem Wennekes

I use either the Adobe Glyph Palette or an InDesign script that generates all the glyphs in a font in one go.