h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do any of you you know how to access alternate characters from each
keyboard key, i.e. if I hold down the option key and go from L to R i get things like this
œ ® † ¥ “ ‘ ß ƒ © ¬ … ç n µ ÷ and with shift it's Œ „ ‰ Á ” ’ Í Î Ï Ó Ô Ò Ú ¸ Ç ˜ ¯ ¿
but what I want is MORE
like a half, one over two, A whole split into two equal parts yeah, you know what I mean
or a quarter or a list of alternates a lot more useful than those listed above
any knowledge to share! I've been looking everywhere and I can't believe there's no half here somewhere

Have you tried the 'Special Characters' menu?

It gives you access to many different sets of symbols (maths, arrows, currency symbols, but also ordinary letters with accents, etc.) It also has a 'related' feature (in the 'character info' menu): that is, if you select 'E', related symbols would be 'e È É Ê Ë è é' etc.

You can even have a list of 'favorites'

Hi fluffy

Which OS are you using. If OS 10 then Font Book will tell you what options you have for each font.

Most word processor like M$ Word will substitute if you type 1/2 or 1/4 or pretty much anything like that. Also in Word the Insert menu has a Symbol option which lets you select the font you want to use and copy/paste the relevant character.

As toybox says the Special Characters menu option in the Edit menu of Safari, Firefox and other browsers allows you to insert what you want.

t.

Actually there is a 'special characters' (or 'character palette'?) in the Edit menu you have when no other application is open. (In the finder?)

You can also turn on the "input menu" in the system preferences - the one that lets you switch between keyboard layouts and languages (to type in Chinese, for instance). Buried in that is a keyboard viewer (like the old "Keycaps" in Mac OS 9) and a character viewer. You can access these in any program, once it's turned on.

And in Snow Leopard, the Keyboard "language and text" system preferences now has a "Text" option that turns on keyboard substitutions. One of them automatically changes ½ into ½ (I mean it turns into ½ every time you type ½. Dang! it also makes it impossible *not* to type ½).

great! thanks!!
i will explore those suggestions!

but what i would really like i think is the ability to designate an alternate character set to kick in on those keys
when i hold down the option key
instead of what comes with the mac (default)...

i dont have a whole lot of call for most of those characters...
i guess thats what gets me...
isnt there a character set that has all those common things that theres no room for on the hard keyboard?

and then isnt there a way to substitute it for the alternate that apple has provided?

Maybe his will help:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Ukelele

The problem with "common" is that it is relative - if those keys were used for common math symbols, then all the people who need to type accented characters would have a problem. Meanwhile, not being able to use the "½" ligature isn't terrible because you still make yourself understood by typing 1-slash-2 or "0.5" or "one half"

But it does seem there should be a keyboard layout to choose, for those who want it. I would be surprised if someone didn't create one already - maybe there's a place where people share ukelele layouts.

If you don't want to build a keyboard layout, you can use one of the text-subsitution systems, like the one built into snow leopard, quickeys, textexpander, or quicksilver, etc.