"Font Variation" in character viewer

Well, now that I've made the ghastly mistake of "upgrading" to 10.9....
Is there any way to make the "Font Variation" aspect of Character Viewer behave the way it did in 10.6? I want to see all the font names all the time, each under its glyph, not just the font of a single glyph when I click on it. How do I know which fonts contain a particular character?

Tom Gewecke wrote:
I think the app Ultra Character Map can do what you want.
Most apps will automatically use a font which has the character, even if you have selected one that does not.
Yup. I can remember when users of That Other Platform had to have it explained to them that Font Substitution is good and useful and desirable. That was only about 10 years ago. For that matter, I can also remember when "Font Substitution" meant that your printer replaced New York with Times. I definitely don't miss that stage! But there are still times I'd like to know which fonts actually contain a given character.
I'll have to assume that all the other useful features are also gone:
show character selected in application
paste into application (as an alternative to using the Unicode Hex Input keyboard layout, which always smacks of Windows circa 2002)
built-in link to FontBook application
list option to show all fonts containing a particular glyph
Sigh.
Ultra Character Map may indeed be what I want. $9.99. Thanks, Apple! It riles me that someone decided all these features are not only unnecessary but actively harmful, requiring their removal from OS > 10.6. There's no way to downgrade your operating system, is there?

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Glyph View in Character Viewer?

Back in Snow Leopard, we had the possibility to view all characters of a certain font if we selected "View>Glyph" in the character viewer. In Lion, this option seems to be missing. Is there any way to browse all characters of a specific font?
The reason I need this: I have several special fonts with symbols for scientific work (really specialized fonts, with characters you won't find in the symbols Apple provides). In SnowLeopard, they didn't show up in the character viewer as normal symbols, but in Glyph View one could select the font and then all characters were displayed, so one could easily select the right symbol (my friends using Windows could even assign a keyboard shortcut for each character in their character viewer).

No, thanks. That still doesn't let you show the characters that are availalble for a particular font. That big assortment of arrows it's showing? Essentially useless, because they're not available in any font I can find.
I did discover a cumbersome workaround by using both Font Book and Character Viewer.
1. Go into Font Book and select the "custom" preview. Put the cursor in that editable preview area.
2. Now go over to Character Viewer and double-click the character or symbol you're interested in. It will be pasted into the "custom" preview of Font Book. However, there's a bug; for some reason after the special character is pasted in, the glyphs that were showing for the font will return to being boxes. You have to select a different font and come back, in order to display the glyphs again.
You can now use the up/down arrow keys to step through all the fonts in Font Book and at least see which fonts have the character(s) you're looking for.

How do I use a font variation in a pages document. I no longer have the "viewer" -glyph option in special characters pane only new mbPro with Lion. I know the variation is available because I can see it in the font book. so now what I just want to be

How do I use a font variation in a pages document? or other app for that matter? I no longer have the "viewer" - glyph option in the special characters pane (under edit in toolbar). I know the varaition ia available because I can see it in my font book. I depended on that alot so I need to find a way to still use character and embellishments. I don't want to have to go back to my od computer (from2007) Please Help!

I really don't understand.
The menu item is available :
Maybe, you didn't activate the tool :
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 2 août 2011 23:10:17
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community
To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

How to get character viewer to show a specific font

Previously you could specify a font to see it's characters and glyphs. Now I don't see how to do that. What am I missing? or has that gone the way of font specification in the keyboard viewer too?

Yes, this feature has been omitted from Lion Character Viewer. You might try PopChar. And you can ask Apple to put it back here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Missing Unicode font in Character Viewer

The OS 10.6 Character Viewer has a View menu from which one can select the Glyph mode then select a font from the Font menu. How can I get Lion's CV to display my Unicode font and allow me to insert its characters into documents?

jkent4mac wrote:
The CSTwo and CSThree fonts are from the ChordSymbol2 family. They were developed by John Clelvenger and are sold through The Virtual Conservatory (www.virtualconservatory.com).
Thanks for that info! I found a character map at
http://www.wix.com/virtualconservatory/home#!menu/vstc1=character-maps
It's a bit odd they would call these "unicode" fonts, since they replace almost all the required unicode glyphs with specialized music symbols. Normally they would be called "non-unicode" unless they put all that into the Private Use Area.
Glad you were able to solve your problem!

OS X lion dosn't view fonts in character viewer, this is big problem, OS X lion dosn't view fonts in character viewer, this is big problem

character viewer cant' view fonts, so my language have 52 letters all this letters are not listed in character viewer, so i cant pick that letters, and i installed fonts have that letters, that is big mistake of os x lion, then i am using another pc windows7 for that.

What language are you talking about? You should not need to see fonts in Character Viewer to input any language using the standard Unicode encoding -- input is done via a dedicated keyboard layout.
PopChar is an app that can input characters from individual fonts. Also you can transplant Character Viewer for Snow Leopard to Lion and run it as an independent app if you want.

Lion Character viewer "insert with font" option missing.

In Lions character viewer, the "insert with font" option is missing. Anyone who knows how to fix this?

Jef Wellens wrote:
Seems to be an Adobe thing. CS5 and character viewer is a no go.
So you find no way to transfer something from Character Viewer, not double clicking, not drag and drop directly or from Favorites?
You might see if the Adobe Forums have something on it.

A lot of characters missing from "Character Viewer" .. can I get them?

Most musical symbols show an empty box.
Other categories too...
Could I've erased them? With CleanMyMac maybe?

Character Viewer isn't doing what I want it to do, can somebody help me?
Here's the issue: I have a font installed called Anastasia, which contains musical symbols. I would like to be able to bring up its whole character set on the screen so I can pick which character to insert in my document. It seems to me that this is what Character Viewer is intended to do; however, I can find no way to view the character set for this particular font, Anastasia. The "Muscial Symbols" collection brings up a limited set of symbols, such as notes, but it's an incomplete set and it does not show Anastasia as one of the available font variations. This font is definitely installed and at least one of my installed apps uses it routinely. But it doesn't seem to be accessible through Character Viewer. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks!

The character viewer no longer shows the complete unicode map, as it had in SnowLeopard. How do I get it back?

Just upgraded to Lion. The character viewer, which previously allowed one to see the entire unicode map for each font, no longer does this. It shows only certain kinds of symbols, not all of them. I am unhappy: I need to be able to access alternative letters and symbols, not just European vowels. Can someone help me?

Hi Sally,
I is still there, but a bit hidden.
1. Open the character viewer
2. Open the gear menu in the top left corner and select 'customize list...'
3. Go down to the bottom of the list 'Select categories...' and open 'Code Tables'.
4. Mark 'Unicode' for inclusion and click 'Done'.
Now open in the character viewer window the freshly added 'Unicode' category.
It is a bit cramped, but there it is: the old and trusted character viewer with all unicode categories and associated font variations.
good luck!
regards,
Twan

How do you add a dingbat to character viewer in order to select it?

I understand that being unicode pages cannot use ITC Zaph dingbats from the keyboard that i need to use the special characters. very awkward! but how do i insert a character from zaph dignbat into special characters?
thank you

If I open Font Book, and choose named font, I can see a list of symbols, e.g.
If I open Character Viewer, and switch to Pictographs, I can see something like this
so I assume that named font includes chars in the category Pictographs, which you can use at ease, I hope.
If you need them frequently, you may create your custom keyboard layout, if you wish this, come back with what you wish.
Screenshots are in Lion, but the procedure is the same, I hope.

Font Selection in Keyboard Viewer

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.

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

Character Viewer

Character Viewer displays thousands of glyphs or images of characters, but it does not identify the Font and/or Keystroke needed to type the character. Double clicking does insert the character. Selecting the character then identifies the Font name, but choosing that Font name, no combination of keystrokes reproduces the character. Is there a way to identify the Font/Keystrokes of these characters in Character Viewer or Keyboard Viewer?
For example: Character:Pictographs displays a Caduceus. Double clicking it inserts the Caduceus image in an Excel cell. Selecting that image in Excel identifies the Font as Menlo Bold. However, using Menlo Bold as a Font there seems no Keystroke that will type that image. In Font Book examining Menlo Bold reveals a huge number of letters/symbols/images available, but no information about how to type them. Indeed, there are so many images there can't possibly be enough keystroke combinations to cover them all. I'm confused.
(Note to Admin. If this query is in wrong forum please move it)

So thanks, that sort of helps. However, I quickly learned that Office does not respond to the System Preference settings (I set opt-c to type a caduceus), while Mail does. I guess Apple software does and others don't? Word and Excel do respond to Character Viewer double click insertions. Does opt-c ç becomes caduceus? ç, NO, guess not. But Character Viewer produces ⚕. So Safari in this message does not respond to System Preferences either. Filemaker doesn't either. Just where does System Preferences:Language & Text:Text:symbol/text substitution work? Is there some other step that makes it work in Office, Filemaker, et. al.? I sort of feel like 1984 all over again. When I first got my MacPlus fonts were truly fascinating, and what the Mac allowed me to do with fonts seemed awesome (until Multifinder came along it was the neatest thing). I bought programs that let you draw your own fonts-I had Suitcases full of them and even memorized ASCI. Now all I really want is a single keystroke that will type a caduceus in MS Word. Please don't advise me to switch to AppleWorks or Pages. Clearly Character Viewer sends some code (?ASCI) to Word that inserts a caduceus. Is there a way I can do that without having to stop typing and start clicking after opening Character Viewer? I know I can save the caduceus in Clipboard and use Com-v for caduceus, but I use the Clipboard for other stuff too often. Clipboard? Does that date me too? Frankly, I miss it.

What happened to glyph option in character viewer in Lion?

The character viewer has changed and I frequently use this to access glyphs. Am I missing something?

Apple decided to omit the View = Glyph option in Lion. I think it is a big mistake. The place to tell them is
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
I don't have popchar, but the stuff I read sure makes it sound like you can select a font and access its glyphs, e.g.
http://www.macworld.com/article/153197/2010/08/popchar5.html

Character viewer- Characters

I'm not sure if this is the place to ask, but for lack of another one, here goes.
I constantly use the ℃ symbol in my writings, emails, etc. But every one I select turns into Lucida 12, and I do most writing in Times. The Lucida is taller, changing my line spacing and looking bad. I can then manually change the size (need to drop it to 10 to fit the line height).
The Character viewer has dozens of fonts identified, but all insert as Lucida 12. What am I missing?

except perhaps for printing
Yup. Clients have tons of money invested in older fonts. No chance they're going to just toss them. We see Type 1 fonts all the time.
Looking at the glyph catalogs of the versions of those two fonts that come with OS X, I don't see this character.
You are right. I had to look again after your comment. Turns out when TextEdit switches, it's just going back to the Celsius glyph in Lucida Grande anytime you click on a Unicode font which doesn't actually contain that glyph. So all three fonts I mentioned do not contain that glyph. Mostly odd that it switches whenever I click on a Type 1 Courier font, which is certainly not Unicode.

Character viewer opens and closes itself repeatedly

I am trying to access special characters via the character viewer. When I click show character viewer, the viewer pops up. It pops up with Lucida as the default font. Switches itself to an A font (Abadi in my case) and closes. I click onto the desktop, the character viewer reappears, repeats the above behavior. Rinse and repeat in a loop.
The behavior only stops when I click "Hide Character Viewer"
How do I get my character picker back to normal?

That partially worked. After trashing the .plist (I trashed 2 charpalette .plists...one with an IM in its name...deleting this one seemed to have made the behavior stop, not the charpaletteserver one), the thing will pop open in Roman view and it works as expected. If I switch the view to Glyph, it repeats the above behavior.
Incidentally, the palette is not remembering the view I had when I closed it as it behaved pre-Snow Leopard.

"Font Variation" in character viewer

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