Quicktip #14 (February 14, 2009): Insert a ? or a ?

Let’s say you are editing a Valentine’s Day video for your sweetheart and you want to insert a heart shape into a title or to use as a graphic element. If you have some ornamental fonts installed you could search it out that way or you could access any number of odd characters via the International Input Menu. First you must turn on the input menu via the System Preferences > International > Input Menu. Then check Show input in menu bar:

Once that is turned on you will see a little flag in your menu bar. Under that menu choose Show Character Palette:

Up pops a window with lots of different ornamental characters as well as tons of other stuff including stars, crosses, Greek symbols and braille patterns:

This floating palette can then be used to insert a heart or any other character into pretty much any application ?. Just click into the application you want to insert the character in to, click over to the palette, select your character and click Insert ? “

This works in a lot (but not all) Mac OSX applications. Now … get to work on next year’s Valentine’s Day video since it’s too late to make one for today.