Font Selection in Keyboard Viewer

Question

In previous versions of the OS the Keyboard Viewer let me choose what font I wanted to view. Now all I see are "Standard" and a few odd fonts. Am I missing some preference setting that will allow me to view ANY font? I have, for instance, Koch Signs which I can't view at all any more.

Answer 1

Tom Gewecke wrote:
for most special characters you must use the Character Palette and not the keyboard for input. The Favorites section of that is designed to provide easier access to special characters that are frequently used. Or a custom keyboard layout can sometimes easily be created to include characters you need all the time.
If you tell us exactly which ones you need, we can probably tell you whether and how a keyboard combo can be used.
In my workflow, the special characters I need to use generally do have a keyboard combination to activate them -- my frustration is over the seemingly increasing hassle it requires to see what that key combination is. And the difficulty with setting "Favorites" is that there aren't really any specific ones I frequently need on a regular basis.
Here's a typical example: I was recently using the Hoefler Text font to generate captions and special titles for some montages I was creating in Photoshop. Hoefler has an "Ornaments" style, which had some decorative glyphs I wanted to use to bookend some of the text entries. Using Font Book (with Preview set to Repertoire) I could easily see all the available glyphs in that Ornaments style, at whatever size I wanted to view them.
So far so good. And each of these characters had its own keyboard combination. The trouble is, Font Book (unless I'm missing something) won't tell me what that keyboard combination is for any given character. And Keyboard Viewer now won't let me select the font and at least see to which keys (and with which modifiers) all of the characters for that font have been mapped. (In fact, Keyboard Viewer should automatically open with whatever font you're currently using already selected.)
So I end up having to run my finger along every key in every row, and then do the same with Shift, Option, and Shift-Option held down, just to figure out which key combo generates the little left-facing squiggly thing in this particular font.
With Character Palette (which I've re-discovered thanks to this and other threads), I can at least use the Insert option to pop a selected character into whatever file I was working on -- but how do I first try out a special "string" of these characters to see how they'll look together? I seem to recall the old Key Caps utility would let you do that.
I guess my main point is that all of these kinds of functions and options need to be integrated into Font Book in an easy-to-use way.
PS The best place to tell Apple how you feel about this issue is here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
Believe me, I have. For many, many apps. Many, many times.
I sometimes wonder how seriously the Feedback is actually monitored, however, since very often the options offered in the questions you need to fill out (what version of the app are you currently using; which version of the OS; etc.) are several months out of date. One can only hope that even though the pages themselves are not being actively maintained, at least some of the user input sent via those pages does get looked at.
(And while Apple would never say this publicly, IMHO if they're smart they've also got a staff of people whose only job is to monitor the Apple Discussions Forums, and track what's working and what's causing frustrations in the OS, its hardware, and all of the apps.)
In any case, thanks Tom for the reply and the offer of assistance.
John Bertram
Toronto