Special Character Shortcuts

Where’s the Ơ? or the Ű??

John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts

John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts is a great tool, a comprehensive PDF showing how to find nearly any special character in any font on either Mac or Windows. The 16-page PDF includes cheatsheets for accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency, legal symbols, math, and greek symbols. Print out the pages for the characters you forget most often, and post them near your computer.

Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, as well as HTML codes for the web. There is also a section on special non-printing characters in QuarkXPress, and a handy typographer’s glossary.

PopChar

Another alternative is to use PopChar(EUR 29.99), which lives in the menu bar and when clicked provides a window listing more special characters than I have ever seen before. Click on a character and it will insert into your open document, wherever your cursor is located. It also provides a font list, so you can select a character in any font installed on your computer. If the font you are using does not have the special character you need, you can substitute one from another font easily.

Differences between the two

“John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts” contains only those characters that can be reached via keyboard shortcuts. PopChar displays ALL special characters and can insert all of them — even if they do not have any keyboard equivalents.

John Brandt’s table contains the shortcuts for the U.S. keyboard. Many of these do not apply to keyboards for other languages, such as German, French, or Spanish (to name just a few). The shortcuts are also useless for all those who use custom or special-purpose keyboard layouts (e.g., Dvorak or the Mac’s “Unicode Hex Input” layout). PopChar is independent of the language or keyboard layout. Even better: If a character has a keyboard equivalent on the currently used keyboard, PopChar displays it when you select the character.

My only gripe with PopChar is that you have to renew your license every 2 years, albeit at a reduced upgrade fee.

CORRECTION! Gunther Blaschek, the developer of PopChar, reminded me that you need to renew ONLY if you want to continue to get updates and upgrades. If you are happy with the current version, no renewal is necessary.

For me, I want to have the latest version. Gunther has been improving PopChar continually since the first version, and it is a much better app than it once was. I don’t need to use it often, but when I do, it is a HUGE time-saver.

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