Apple Mac OS Character Palette
Choose in menu bar
System Preferences -> International
You can use the Mac's Character Palette to insert special characters, such as mathematical symbols, letters with accent marks, or arrows and tons of other symbols into your documents.
You can also use the Character Palette to enter Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean characters, as well as characters from other languages.
The Character Palette appears in the Input menu. The Input menu looks like a flag in the top-right corner of your Menu Bar. If you don't see the Input menu in the menu bar do next:
- Open System Preferences ➢ International (like on a picture).
- Click Input Menu
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Click the checkboxes next to Character Palette and "Show Input menu in menu bar".
View picture to see how this is supposed to look like after you're done.
If an application is specifically designed to work with Mac OS X, you can choose Edit ➢ Special Characters to open the Character Palette.
To use Character Palette
- Open the application you want to type in, and place the insertion point where you want the special character or symbol to appear.
- Choose Edit ➢ Special Characters to open the Character Palette, or click the Input menu icon in the menu bar and choose Show Character Palette.
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Choose the type of characters you want to see from the View pop-up menu at the top of the Character Palette window.
If you don't see the View pop-up menu, click the button in the upper-right corner of the Character Palette to show the top portion of the window. Click this button again to hide the top portion of the window.
- Click an item in the list on the left to see the characters that are available in each category.
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Double-click the character or symbol in the right column that you want to insert into your document.
You can also select the character and click Insert. To see more options for each character, such as the variations in glyphs for some characters, click the Character Info triangle and then the Font Variation triangle at the bottom of the Character Palette window.
Character palette
If the character doesn't appear in your document, you may be using an application that doesn't support that character. Try a different character or try to insert it in a different application.
Type with ease
From Dominique Schwartz:
Up at the top of a Mac there is a permanent toolbar. The icons in it vary, depending on what application(s) you are running. For example: if you have your mailbox open, it has the Apple logo, "Edit", "View", "Mailbox", "Message", "Format", "Window", and "Help". However, the "Edit" icon seems to be a permanent fixture in it regardless of what application you're running, along with a few other icons, like "File", etc. I clicked on "Edit" in that top-of-the-screen toolbar and went from there.
So, clicking Edit, then Special Characters allowed me to then copy and paste those characters into my Facebook. That's something that might help other Mac users.
You can also use the Keyboard Viewer to type special characters and symbols. For more information, see Mac keyboard symbol shortcuts.
Mac keyboard symbol shortcuts Read what shortcuts you can use to type symbols and special characters from your keyboard on Apple Mac computers. 
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