Inserting special characters

[Phil82]

I need to insert a lot of characters from the Greek alphabet, things like Tau, Gamma, Theta, etc. How do I do that in Mellel as these aren't available from the menus?

[jannuss]

I need to insert a lot of characters from the Greek alphabet, things like Tau, Gamma, Theta, etc. How do I do that in Mellel as these aren't available from the menus?

Have you tried using a Secondary Font?

Even if your Main Font includes Greek characters, you can define it as the Secondary Font as well (with the script set to Greek) and then flip/flop between English and Greek using keyboard shortcuts.

Or, if you only occasionally require the most common Greek letters, they might be available in your font using the alt key. For example, in Lucida Grande, alt-p give pi and alt-m gives mu. You can check this with Keyboard Viewer.

Janet

[Mart°n]

If you only need to enter special characters here and there, you could use the Mac OS X character palette. You could access it from the Menu: Edit › Special Characters…. This is a bit confusing as the other special characters are available from the Insert Menu but it should work anyway. If you have opened the palette, you could chose different views (the top most drop down menu) to see all the characters. Once you’ve found the right one, just double click it to insert the thing at the current cursor position.

[nicka]

If you only need to enter special characters here and there, you could use the Mac OS X character palette.

It might be useful that you can put characters that you want to use frequently in the Favourites section. Select the character you want, then click the gear symbol at the bottom left and choose Add to Favourites.

[jannuss]

If you only need to enter special characters here and there, you could use the Mac OS X character palette.

It seems a bit of overkill to use the Character Palette to get at characters that are easily available in many fonts. Even using Favorites as Nicka suggests is much more clumsy than simply switching the keyboard to Greek and typing the characters needed.

I click opt-space [the shortcut I use for keyboard switching] and type r for rho, d for delta, l for lamda, and so on. opt-space puts me back in English input mode. And, as I already said, if I need a common character like pi, I don't even have to switch keyboards. alt-p produces a small pi and shift-alt-p a large one.

[Phil82]

Well, I've solved it by using the Greek Polytonic keyboard layout. This is quite easy, as I can use the CMD-Space keyboard short cut to switch between by GB keyboard layout and the Greek layout, making inserting Greek characters a snap .

God I love OS X.

[mkenney]

I don't know whether you are using polutonic Greek, but if you are you should look at the SophoKeys keyboard. It is a free download from Sourceforge (I think it's Sourceforge). Especially usefull is the SophoKeys Express keyboard, which makes the insertion of diacriticals very easy and logical.