Download: Special Character Shortcuts v.1.4

John Brandt's Special Character Shortcuts is a beautiful, useful, comprehensive PDF that shows how to access any special character in any font. It can be used for finding the keystrokes necessary to type accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency and legal symbols, math and greek symbols. Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, and also HTML codes for using these special characters on Web pages.

It also includes a special section on typing special nonprinting characters in QuarkXPress 7, as well as a clear description of how these special characters work, and a handy and informative typographer's glossary.

PopChar

Another excellent cross-platform tool for finding, viewing and selecting characters is PopChar, from Ergonis. PopChar X shows all the characters in a font and lets you insert any one of them by clicking on it. Its palette can float above other windows, and it detects the current font in most applications.

It can display either ASCII characters or Unicode characters, and when in Unicode mode, the glyphs are grouped by category (Latin, punctuation, symbols, etc.) An innovative Spotlight-like field lets you search for glyphs by character, name, or category (Greek, ligature, punctuation, etc.). As you hover over a character, the keystrokes needed to insert the character are displayed.

It can highlight your recently used characters, and its font menu can group your recently used fonts together. You can insert a character either without formatting (it then takes on the formatting of its insertion point), or with the font and size you choose in PopChar. It can also paste as HTML code for use in Web pages.

If you work with special characters, picture fonts, or want to explore the vastness of OpenType fonts, PopChar greatly simplifies the process. It costs 30 euros.