Monday, December 10, 2007

The case of the disappearing Character palette

The Character palette and the Keyboard Viewer sometimes do not come up when you want to. You can try to click on its menu item in both the Edit menu and the Flag menu, and it remains hidden.

The reason is that some cache files are corrupted.

The solution is to delete the following files from /System/Library/Caches:
  • com.apple.IntlDataCache.le
  • com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.kbdx
  • com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.sbdl
  • com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.tecx
And then restart.

After that, it should be no problem accessing the Character palette from the Edit menu, in applications that support it, like Pages, or from the flag menu.

If it does not appear in the flag menu, go to System Preferences > International > Keyboards and activate it.

Update 21 January 2008: Apple today posted a very similar solution here.

4 comments:

Vogel's said...

I can't find the cache elements that you are saying to delete and I still can't get the character palette.

Magnus Lewan said...

Vogel, do you have Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)? You may want to have a look at the page at the page at Apple.com I link to above. They have some additional advice.

Anonymous said...

Excellent, it works.
Go to the folder System/Library/Caches and look for the com..le.. files, drag to Trash, restart, it works.
Thank you very much.

Do not follow this link http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307354

Anonymous said...

Thanks Magnus - the support on the Apple link you gave was perfect and brought hours of searching for the character palette in Pages to an end. Great stuff!