


MacBook keyboard special characters and accents map.Click on the list below to jump to an appropriate section. Even as Unicode continues to add many scripts used for languages with relatively few living speakers, those characters also understandably remain absent from most fonts, too-there’s little call for them.This is the ultimate guide for working with MacBook keyboards, including accessing special functions, characters, accents, and using keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS system.

More robust fonts may include hundreds of extra symbols and characters beyond the primary scripts they represent, whether they’re focused on European languages, Adlam, Arabic, Devanagari, Hanzi, or any of hundreds of others.įew fonts represent more specialized and obscure characters, such as those used for antique musical notation or dead languages. (A script is a set of characters used in a language, and several languages may share one script.) For European designs, that’s typically what’s Latin-related letters (covering English and most of Western Europe), Greek, and Cyrillic (used for Ukrainian, Russian, and other Eastern European languges). That’s because of the issue above: Unicode is comprehensive while fonts’ character sets are finite.Ī digital font typically includes only the characters needed to represent one or more scripts. (In digital usage, a typeface typically describes a family of fonts with a consistency of design a font is a file that contains one or more variations of that typeface, like bold or italic.)īut you might try to copy and paste the above symbol into a document or bring it up in the Character Viewer and get no result.

Font-design tools help keep consistency and automate production, but drawing remains at the heart, keeping character counts low for reasons of profit for commercial typefaces and sheer time for those created for joy, to preserve dying languages, and to expand access. Because a type designer has to draw each character in a digital font uniquely, there’s no way for each font to contain more than a few hundred to the low thousands of characters. Most fonts contain an extremely small subset of those 150,000-odd characters. The standard currently includes nearly 150,000 unique characters, each with its own number and description. Unicode encompasses scripts used by languages, symbols for scientific notation, emoji, and other kinds of marks. Apple offers robust support in macOS for Unicode, a standard that provides a unique number to represent characters and symbols.
