Special characters are all of those symbols and glyphs that are not available to you by way of direct keyboard input, and in modern operating systems with full Unicode character palettes, there are thousands of them. Your Mac comes with numerous type faces, many of which are fonts for specific languages, so they contain vast arrays of unique characters. In addition, there are numerous symbols, technical and otherwise, that are included with OS X. Continue reading
Quickly access special characters in OS X
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When typing out documents in OS X you might resort to the services offered by Microsoft Word and or Apple’s Pages, as these have convenient tools for adjusting the type face, accessing special characters, and otherwise manipulating your text; however, in addition there are a number of built-in panels in OS X that can give you similar access to features like special characters, word suggestions, and dictionary lookup of word selections. Being built-in, these can work even in programs that do not have their own obvious text manipulation controls. 
Apple includes a number of built-in screen savers in OS X that can show iTunes artwork, photos from your iPhoto library, and decorative patterns, among other options. One of these is the “Message” screen saver, that might be attractive to some because it offers a more subtle option of displaying a quick text message (which by default is your Mac’s computer name). You can leave this default text as the message to use, but if you want you can customize it, and even spice it up a little by adding emoticons.