Keying Funky Characters on a Mac

What is that!?

How many times have you been confronted with a character in a manuscript that an author tried unsuccessfully to key? I think most editors know how to key accented characters that are common in English and other Western European alphabets—what the Unicode standard calls the Basic Latin character set. É, ñ, and even ø are pretty easy. But what if your manuscript uses Eastern European letters like ł or č? What if the author wanted an IPA ə but typed in “e” or “<schwa>”? What about non-Latin scripts; how do you key “ϖ,” “Ӈ,” “ש,” “ظ,” or “亃” when the author was unable to do so?

Word offers the Insert Symbol palette, but on the current Mac version, you can’t get much beyond Basic Latin. To access characters used in Polish, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, or Chinese, you have to rely on the Mac operating system, and that’s not necessarily bad.

Check Your Versions

Apple has released several versions of Mac OS X in the last ten years; I’m using OS X 10.7.5 (aka “Lion”). The instructions I’m about to give may need to be tweaked for your OS. If something I’ve outlined doesn’t work for you, send me an email, and I’ll try to get you up and going.

I’m working in Microsoft Word 2011, but because we’ll be using a function of the OS, the instructions should apply to any word processor or, indeed, any program.

A New Keyboard

Though you may not know it, OS X allows users to plug in keyboards—what it calls “input sources”—designed for many languages. If you’re in the United States, you probably told your Mac during its initial set up that you use U.S. English as your primary language, so the installation software activated support for a U.S. input source. We need to add support for a second input source (this one being a kind of virtual keyboard) that you can activate and de-activate as you need it. This second input source allows you to key in a four-digit hexadecimal number that represents a character in the Unicode standard. Here’s how you do it.

1. Open “System Preferences”
2. Click on the “Keyboard” control panel and make sure that you’re on the “Keyboard” tab.
3. Click on the “Input Sources” button.
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and check the “Unicode Hex Input” source. (“U.S.” should already be checked.)
   A keyboard shortcut for switching between the input sources should be set up by default. It should be listed in the right-hand side of the panel near the top, and it’s probably “⌘Space.” Remember that keyboard shortcut.
5. Close the “System Preferences.”

Finding the Funky

Once you’ve turned on “Unicode Hex Input,” you should be able to key the four-digit hexadecimal number that will call the Unicode character you want, assuming it’s included in the font you’re using. (The current version of Times New Roman has just about every character you’ll need, but Arial Unicode has even more characters available. Word will try to substitute something like Lucida Grande if the font you’re using doesn’t include the character you key.) How, though, do you know what character you need or what it’s hex code is?

Identifying the character can be tricky, and you may have to ask the author to identify it for you. You should also be aware that some characters look amazingly similar. A minus sign (hex code 2212) and an en dash (hex code 2013) look alike, but they’re not the same. You may consider that to be overly picky, but precision now can prevent trouble later. Consider a Latin capital “m” (004D) and Greek capital mu (039C) for example. They look identical. If you (or the author) were to use a capital “m” instead of a capital mu because it’s easier to find, and if during composition the capital needed to become lower-case, the character would become “m” instead of “μ.”

If you know what script (not to be confused with language; Greek uses the Greek script, but Polish uses the Latin script) you’re working with, you can go to the Unicode website and scroll through the charts until you find that script. Within the script pages, you should be able to find the character you’re looking for. You’ll need to note the hexadecimal character number for the character, which will always be four digits and composed of a combination of the numbers 0 through 9 and the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F.

If you know the character, you can just search on the web for “Unicode” and the name of the character. For example, if you google “Unicode Hebrew shin,” you’ll find links to a number of pages that can give you information for that character in the Unicode standard. I often find myself on the site FileFormat.info, which is a great resource for Unicode character information. On the FileFormat.info page for your character, you’ll see the information you need in the “UTF-16 (hex)” field; the actual hex code follows the “0x” in the table. For shin, you’ll see “0x05E9 (05e9),” but what you need to note is just “05E9.”

Making Your Mark

Once you have your hex code, you can key the associated character into your document.

1. Hit the keyboard shortcut you noted in step 4 above to activate the Unicode Hex Input input source. If you normally have a little U.S. Flag in the upper right-hand corner of your screen, you should see it change to a flag with “U+” on it. If the flag doesn’t change, your keyboard shortcut is not working.
2. Put your cursor in the document where you want to insert the Unicode character.
3. Hold down the “Option” key and type in the four-digit Unicode number that you’ve noted (e.g., 05e9; note that the case is irrelevant).
4. Release the “Option” key, and your character should appear.

Remember to return your input source to your native language. If you leave it set to Unicode Hex Input, you’ll find that your Option and ⌘ keys don’t work properly. That’s all there is to it.

I think you’ll find that switching input sources becomes second nature after a while. You’ll probably also begin to remember some codes just from using them so much. I use multiplication signs a fair bit, so I no longer need to look up its code (00D7). The same goes for en spaces (2002) and em spaces (2003).