![]() mapping, which lets you access certain diacritical variations of vowels, such as grave, acute, circumflex, and umlaut, using dead keys. You may be familiar with this from the normal U.S. ![]() In fact, it’s really the mapping (not the font) that’s important, since the Symbol characters appear in many other fonts (and, as we saw earlier, Mac OS X fetches the right character from another font if the designated font lacks it).Īnother common keyboard mapping device is to introduce "dead" keys. keyboard mapping, Key Caps displays much of the font as blank if you choose the Symbol keyboard mapping, the correct characters appear. Next, open Key Caps from the Application folder’s Utilities folder, and choose Symbol from the Font menu. To see this, first enable the Symbol mapping in the International preference pane. So to type using the Symbol font, you must use a different keyboard mapping: you type in the ordinary way, but your keystrokes generate different keycodes than they normally would, so you reach the area of the Unicode repertoire where the Symbol characters are. In Mac OS X, though, Symbol characters are Unicode characters they aren’t in the ASCII range at all. In Mac OS 9, the Symbol font was just an alternative set of characters superimposed on the ASCII range. Normally, of course, every key generates a character from the ASCII range of characters. A keyboard mapping is the relationship between the key you type and the character code you generate. In real life, there needs to be a better way of typing characters. Now, Unicode Hex Input, though it can generate any Unicode character if you happen to know its hex code, is obviously impractical. This way, font manufacturers can specialize, and each font can contribute just a subset of the Unicode repertoire. That’s important, because a font containing all Unicode characters would be huge, not to mention a lot of work to create. Is this because every font in Mac OS X includes Cyrillic letters? No! It’s because, if the characters to be displayed aren’t present in the font you designate, Mac OS X automatically hunts through your installed fonts to find any font that includes them, and uses that instead. Observe that if you now select "Yuri" and change the font, it still reads correctly. The values you typed were the Unicode hexadecimal (base-16) numeric codes for these characters. You’ll see the Russian name "Yuri" written as three Cyrillic characters. Now hold down the Option key and type (without quotes or spaces) "042E 0440 0438". From the keyboard menu, choose Unicode Hex Input. Launch TextEdit from your Applications folder. Afterwards, a keyboard menu will appear in your menu bar (on my machine this looks, by default, like an American flag). Thus there has to be what’s called an "input method." Here’s a simple one: open the International preferences pane of Mac OS X’s System Preferences, go to the Keyboard Menu tab, and enable the Unicode Hex Input checkbox. ![]() Now, clearly you won’t be able to do this in the ordinary way, since the keyboard keys alone, even including the Option and Shift modifiers, can’t differentiate even 256 characters. In this concluding part of the article, we’ll look for it.įorced Entry - To prove to yourself that Unicode is present on your computer, you can type some of its characters. In the first part of this article, I introduced you to Unicode, a grand unification scheme whereby every character in every writing system would be represented by a unique value, up to a potential one million distinct characters and symbols. Two Bytes of the Cherry: Unicode and Mac OS X, Part 2
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