Text symbols on Mac

Mac keyboard symbol shortcuts

You can input more text symbols on Macintosh computers with the use of keyboard than you see painted on your keyboard.

Diacritical (accents, umlauts)

To type accent characters, like ñ Á á in Spanish language, experiment with [Option] key. Note, that [A] + [B] stands for holding both keys pressed down at the same time. Just Like you hold [Shift] and [A] to make UPCASE "A" letter.

Characters	Sequence	Name
Áá Éé Íí Óó Úú	[Option] + [E] followed by [Your Vowel] + (optional) [Shift]	Acute letters
Àà Èè Ìì Òò Ùù	[Option] + [`] followed by [Your Vowel] + (optional) [Shift]	Grave accent
Ââ Êê Îî Ôô Ûû	[Option] + [I] followed by [Your Vowel] + (optional) [Shift]	Circumflex
Ää Ëë Ïï Öö Üü Ÿÿ	[Option] + [U] followed by [Your Vowel] + (optional) [Shift]	Umlaut
Ãã Ññ Õõ	[Option] + [N] followed by [Your Vowel] + (optional) [Shift]	Tilde

Several other diacritical letters are listed below in signs and symbols section because they're typed similarily to those.

Signs and symbols

System Preferences -> International

Keyboard viewer of Mac OS

You can use standard built-in applet called "Keyboard viewer" to make things easier. It displays an on-screen keyboard layout which changes when you press modifier keys like [Option] and [Shift]. This layout is also different for different languages you select, so Keyboard Viewer can also help you see which key stands for what characters if you switch to a different language.

To enable Keyboard Viewer

Choose Apple menu ➢ System Preferences and click International.
Click Input Menu, then select the check-box next to Keyboard Viewer.
Select the "on" check-box next to language whose keyboard layout you want to use.
Choose Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu on the right side of the menu bar (the one that looks like a flag).

Now, depending on the language you select, a flag will be in the menu bar. Whenever you want to type a special character, click the flag and select "Show Keyboard Viewer". When you press Shift and Option buttons, the on-screen keyboard will show up. And the good thing is, you don't have to keep a list of shortcut codes near you.

Symbol shortcuts

While still using your own language, you can type symbols like "√ ∑ π ™ © æ £ ¢", etc. with your keyboard. Try pressing [Option] key and [Option] + [Shift] combination with Keyboard Viewer open to see what else you need to press to make these special characters. For example, [Option] + [v] makes √.

Key	+ [Option]	+ [Option] + [Shift]	Key	+ [Option]	+ [Option] + [Shift]
A	å	Å	1	¡	⁄
B	∫	ı	2	™	€
C	ç	Ç	3	£	‹
D	∂	Î	4	¢	›
E		´	5	∞	ﬁ
F	ƒ	Ï	6	§	ﬂ
G	©	˝	7	¶	‡
H	˙	Ó	8	•	°
I		ˆ	9	ª	·
J	∆	Ô	0	º	‚
K	˚	Apple	`		`
L	¬	Ò	-	–	—
M	µ	Â	=	≠	±
N		˜	[	“	”
O	ø	Ø	]	‘	’
P	π	∏	\	«	»
Q	œ	Œ	/	÷	¿
R	®	‰	;	…	Ú
S	ß	Í	'	æ	Æ
T	†	ˇ	,	≤	¯
U		¨	.	≥	˘
V	√	◊
W	∑	„
X	≈	˛
Y	¥	Á
Z	Ω	¸

So, for example, Apple logo symbol can be typed on Macs by simultaneously holding [Option], [Shift] and [K] keys.

You can also check out Macintosh character set at Adobe.com for a very nice table of characters / inputs.

Try it

Apple Mac OS Character Palette (map of text symbols)

Apple Mac OS Character Palette Find out how you can use Mac's built-in Character Palette to insert special text symbols, characters from other languages, etc. ☀ ☃ ♡ ℃ ℬℯ ℋℰℛℰ

Comments

Comment

Here is a list of the mac alt characters.

1 = ¡	q = œ	a = å	z = Ω
2 = ™	w = ∑	s = ß	x = ≈
3 = £	e = ´	d = ∂	c = ç
4 = ¢	r = ®	f = ƒ	v = √
5 = ∞	t = †	g = ©	b = ∫
6 = §	y = ¥	h = ˙	n = ˜
7 = ¶	u =¨	j = ∆	m = µ
8 = •	I = ˆ	k = ˚	, = ≤
9 = ª	o = ø	l = ¬	. = ≥
0 = º	p = π	; = …	/ = ÷
- = –	[ = “	space = æ
= = ≠	] = ‘
	\ = «

Question

Who programs and makes these encodings official?

Regarding Mac symbols. I switched about six months ago, and I'm still trying to get beyond "On my PC I used to do it this way......".

Answer

I belive, some IT crowds make encodings. Like Unicode Consortium. Kinds of different people, and Microsoft/Mac/Linux, etc guys that implement those encodings into the real life. Maybe even you can suggest some symbol for implementation, but there's a real problem in the fact that this doesn't mean that Microsoft is gonna implement it into Windows soon, and stuff and stuff. Pretty problematic, and different systems have different parts of those character sets installed. But there's no problem with the casual ones so.. =)

How do you make a butterfly on a PC keyboard? Because I was on Facebook there was a person with a butter fly and I wanted to know if there was a code that I had to use?

It's made out of different symbols that are pretty hard to type. εїз Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ. People usually just copy-paste this.

alt codes