If you have ever needed to use your Mac to type in a different language, you may have felt frustrated by the experience. Whether you have a Mac with a keyboard in Western English or any other language that is not your own, you know it can be difficult to switch your keyboard into a character set that is worth using.
In this tutorial, I will help you set up other character palettes for your keyboard, show you how to switch to those palettes (meaning those characters will be mapped to the keyboard you are using) and finally, show you how to see which characters are mapped to individual keys.
This tutorial will work for you regardless of which language you intend to type in, provided that Apple provides a character palette for your language. Thus, whether you prefer French, Swedish, Kanji, or Arabic — among dozens of others — you can use this tutorial.
Changing Settings in System Preferences
Step #1: Open System Preferences and click on the International system preference. From here, click on the Input Menu tab. You should have a screen similar to this:
As you can see, I have circled several check boxes. You will be considering those and others in the next step.
Step 2: Now, you must select which keyboard character palettes you want to use. I highly recommend you click the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer items. In addition to those, scroll through the list of available languages to find those that you wish to use and mark the check box for each of them. Finally, mark the check box next to Show input menu in menu bar.
Step #3: This step is optional, but if you are unaccustomed to typing in your language’s keyboard, you will want to open the Keyboard Viewer from the input menu in the menu bar.
Step #4: Now, select the language you want to use from the input menu in the menu bar. You may now begin typing in that language! If you are not certain how to use the keyboard, the Keyboard Viewer will show you how each character is mapped onto your current keyboard.
And here is the keyboard viewer, showing the Wubi Xing palette:
Did this tip work for you? How else do you deal with typing in other languages. Let others know in the comments.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
where is the input menu?
even if I checked show input menu in menu bar, i dont see it =/
Thanks. Just what I was looking for!
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