The On-Screen Keyboard Viewer in Mac OS X - Find All Those Weird Symbols

Back in OS9 this thing was easy to find and it was very useful for those strange symbols you needed every now and then. But in Mac OSX they buried it. Then they brought it back...and buried it within the system. So much so that I didn't even know it was there until about a month ago. (I was actually using the glyphs panel in Illustrator to find symbols, which was a bit pointless to say the least.)

So, where is it? Well, it's hidden within the options listed under International in System Preferences. To activate it select "Open International" listed below your language flag on the top panel of the screen.

This will bring up System Preferences. Amongst the options you will see is "Input Menu" and there you will find the option to activate "Keyboard Viewer".

Check the box next to it and you're done.

To bring up the on-screen keyboard simply click on your language flag and select "Show Keyboard Viewer" in the drop down panel. And there you go.

This is why manuals used to be nice.

K. Panda