How do I type Wingdings in Pages?

Wingdings and Webdings are fonts with small images instead of the letters. My personal recommendation is that you do not use them, even if you have the fonts. This is why:

Every document you type will be read by someone - either by someone else or by yourself in a few minutes, days or years. A document you type with Latin letters or any standard unicode letters is likely to be legible by anyone with the right software - today and in the future. But Wingdings is not standard unicode.

Now, let's assume that you want to show the yin-and-yang symbol to a reader.


You know that it is part of the Wingdings font, so you decide to get the symbol there.

So what you can do is to activate the Keyboard Viewer. Then select Wingdings from the menu in the bottom left corner and then select Wingdings as font in Pages and start typing.


However, when you send this Pages document to another computer user, it is very possible that he will not have the Wingdings font, so the character will not display. What is displayed is just "[" because that is the character that Wingdings uses to display the yin-yang symbol.

And the same thing can happen to you. When you change the paragraph style in this document, the symbol will become "[". If you copy the text to another application, it will become "[". If you export it to RTF and then open it in TextEdit, it will become "[". It is basically a very unstable character - just like all other characters in Wingdings, Webdings and Monotype Sorts.

TextEdit does not even allow you to type the character, and that is probably a wise choice. You can insert it from the Character Palette to TextEdit. You find it in the Character Palette with the View PIFonts, Font: Wingdings-Regular. However, what is inserted is the unicode F05B which is in the Private Area. The Private Area means that it can be used by anyone for anything, so depending on the available font, it can appear as completely different characters.


As you do not know which font the reader will have available, you will not know what the document will look like to him. That's why it usually is best to avoid Wingdings fonts altogether.

There are perhaps cases where you need to use them, but try to make sure you have a normal picture as a backup - just in case. You can also use Wingdings to create PDF files, as PDFs usually embed the font.

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.

Why are some glyphs missing in Pages?

Glyphs are variants of characters in a font. One example is "fi", which in some fonts may use special glyphs to look like "fi". (Increase the text size in your browser, if you cannot tell the difference.) Sometimes glyphs are used to make superscripts like ² instead of 2. Sometimes, but not always, what you achieve with a glyph could also be achieved with standard unicode characters.

In a standard MacOS X application, you access glyph variants like Ligatures and other variants from the Font Palette's Typography option.



Each font can contain a large number of glyph variants or no variants at all. You can see exactly which glyphs are available in a font using the Character Palette.



There are of course different ways of handling glyphs in different kinds of fonts. Adobe and Microsoft use mainly OpenType fonts. Apple uses mainly TrueType fonts. OpenType fonts mostly work in MacOS X, but there may be some glyphs that MacOS X does not support.




For example, if you have Adobe InDesign, you can see a section of "Ornaments" glyphs in the OpenType font Adobe Caslon Pro. The selected pointed hand in the picture above is actually a "P" - something you can tell by copying it and pasting it to another application. You can also see that the unicode for the hand is 0050, and that is upper case P.

You can also see that the GID (Glyph ID) in Adobe's InDesign is 642. However Apple's Character Palette gives it GID 523. Clearly, something strange is going on.

If you access the Typography Palette for Adobe Caslon Pro in TextEdit, you do not have any Ornaments section. However, you can still double click the glyph in the Character Palette and display it in TextEdit.

In Pages you cannot even add it by double clicking it in the Character Palette, when you are running Mac OS X 10.4.

And why? Well, because it is an unsupported feature. It may not be a very exhaustive explanation, but that all there is right now.

How do I add Greek symbols to my document?

For the most basic characters, use the following keyboard shortcuts (if you have a US keyboard).

∑ - alt-w
π - alt-p
Ω - alt-z
µ - alt-m

For any character beyond that, use the character palette (Edit > Special Characters).

If you want to type long Greek texts, activate a Greek keyboard in System Preferences > International > Input Menu.

The keyboard simply called "Greek" is good if you type in modern Greek.

The keyboard called "Greek Polytonic" works better if you type text in Ancient Greek, which has more accents and some archaic characters like digamma (ϝ), sampi (ϡ) and koppa (ϙ). The polytonic keyboard lacks some mathematical symbols and a few punctuation marks, that can be found in the "Greek" keyboard.

To see the exact differences between the two Greek keyboards, use the Keyboard Viewer.


Greek Polytonic keyboard.

If you type in ancient Greek, you may run into something that looks like a problem. In unicode there are two versions of accented Greek characters - with tonos (τόνος) and with oxia (οξεία). Luckily they look the same in most fonts. Here is epsilon with tonos: έ. And here it is with oxia: έ. However, in some fonts there is a very clear difference, like in Tahoma:

If you use a font with a difference, you should really use the oxia version with the slanted accent for ancient Greek. But Apple's keyboard only allows you to type the tonos version.

The solution is very simple: use a font where even the tonos version has a slanted accent.