Type Special Characters on your Mac
You’ve no doubt seen them on packaging, on the web and a lot of other places. Now learn how to create a registered trademark symbol ®, the trademark symbol ™, copyright symbol © and more.
First you’ll need to learn a key on your keyboard that you may never use, or have never noticed, the ‘Option’ key:
To type the symbols above (along with a host of different symbols) do the following:
For registered trademark ® : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key and press the letter ‘R
For the trademark symbol ™ : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key and press the ‘2’ key
For the copyright symbol © : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key and press the letter ‘G’
Now that you know how to type the above popular symbols, how about some popular foreign accent characters. These also use the ‘Option’ key, but have a few other tricks up their sleeve. Characters like á é í ó ú can be made by pressing the ‘Option’ key then the letter ‘E’. But, that is just the first step. You then have to press the character you want to type.
For the letter á : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key, press the letter ‘E’, then press the letter ‘A’
For the letter é : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key, press the letter ‘E’, then press the letter ‘E’ again.
For the letter í : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key, press the letter ‘E’, then press the letter ‘I’
For the ó : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key, press the letter ‘E’, then press the letter ‘O’
I’ll let you figure out the last one: ú
You can see this is a 2 step process, press ‘Option’, then ‘E’, then the letter you want. Pressing ‘Option’ and ‘E’ triggers the notification of a special character. Pressing the character you want types the character with the acute.
This is also the case for another popular character the tilde over ñ ã õ. This time the letter ’N’ is the trigger.
For the letter ñ : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key, press the letter ’N’, then press the letter ’N’ again.
For the ã : Press and hold the ‘Option’ key, press the letter ’N’, then press the letter ’A’
You can figure out the last one: õ
If you need access to even more characters, use the built-in Keyboard Viewer or the Character Viewer to see all the different characters hidden in your keyboard.
