Guest Article By: Jon Deal

The Mac has always been known for it’s excellent typographical ability and agility. Macs have had proportional fonts since the beginning and having a large set of professionally designed fonts was one of the reasons Desktop Publishing took off back in the 1980s.

But beyond nice looking fonts, Macs had the ability to quickly access “foreign” characters, such as accented characters. Let’s say you want to type the word “cliché” and need to impress the French person you work with. You need to have that accented “e” in the worst way. On a Mac, hold down the Option key and hit the “e” key. Depending on the program you are in, it’ll look like you didn’t type anything. The cursor doesn’t move. It is waiting for you to type another letter, over which it will place an accent mark, in this case an “acute” mark. (A “grave” mark goes the other direction). Most word processing programs and apps that deal with a lot of text will give some kind of visual feedback. Not all letters can have an accent over them.

As with most graphical things on the Mac, it’s easier to show then explain what is happening. So here is a screen grab of what happens when I hold down the “Option” key. Note the orange keys. Those are the accents, etc.

Now note carefully this second shot. I’ve pressed the “Option + u” key combo and note the that characters which can have have an umlaut over them have changed. So if I smack the “o” key, I’m well on the way to being able to make posters for my death metal band, “Töxic Bööger.”

The easiest way to figure out umlauts, accents, tilde and carat-ed characters is to open up the “Keyboard Viewer” palette. Sadly, it is buried in the “International” System Preference Pane. Back in the stone age of Mac OS 9 and earlier, a program called Key Caps was located in the easy to locate Apple Menu. Apple banished it to the nether regions there in the International Pref Pane and the world is a bit sadder place, frankly. It’s even more annoying because the Keyboard Viewer is under the little menu bar flag in the upper right hand corner of your screen, after you enable it. Seventy-eight steps later, you have the Keyboard Viewer, floating around on your screen.

Play with it for a while. Note also that you can change fonts and the Keyboard Viewer will show you a reasonable view of the font. Bonus! You can use the Keyboard Viewer to type, simply use the mouse to poke at the letters. Though if you can figure out how to do anything besides lower case letters, using only the mouse, I’ll be *very* impressed.

Here are some common typographical marks and the key combos to get them:

• Option + g begets the copyright sign ©
• Option + r grants you a registered trademark ®
• Option + 2 is a plain old trademark â„¢
• Shift + Option + 8 is a degree mark °
• Option + 1 gets you an upside down exclamation point and all your Spanish speaking friends will the so impressed¡!
• Shift + Option + 2 and you have a “Euro” mark €
• Option + ; gives you “real” ellipses and not just three periods in a row.

Jon Deal is a long time Mac user who has worked in pre-press and graphic design since the dawn of time. His personal site can be found here.