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.

How do I type characters from foreign languages?

For some simple accents and variants of the basic Latin alphabet it is very easy. The steps below will tell you how to see which characters are easy to type with your keyboard.

1. Activate the Keyboard Viewer. (System Preferences > International > Input Menu. Check the checkbox before Keyboard Viewer.)

2. In the flag menu in the upper right corner of the screen, choose Show Keyboard Viewer .



The Keyboard Viewer shows what character will be printed when you use a specific key combination.

3. Hold down a modifier key, like "alt" (⌥).



All accents that are available using "alt" with that keyboard layout are highlighted in orange. In the picture above, I am using U.S. Extended as keyboard layout, but you may have another one.

4. Now press one of the keys that were highlighted in orange, like "e" (acute accent ´ in the picture).



You now see all characters that take an acute accent with this keyboard layout. To type for example á, you would consequently first hold down ⌥ at the same time as you type e, and then press the a-key.


Chances are the characters you want are available with your standard keyboard. Following the steps above you can tell if that is the case.

To learn more about which languages and language features are supported, go to this page.

For instructions for most languages of the world, see the excellent page Unleash Your Multilingual Mac.

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.