Inserting a Unicode Character into MS Word or TextEdit on Mac OS Yosemite

If you write articles for science journals you probably frequently need to insert special characters in your text. Often it is much easier to find a Unicode representation of the character you need rather than hunt through the many fonts installed on your Mac system or the character you need might not be included in an available font.

The answer is to enable typing Unicode directly into documents on Mac. I found some other blog posts and forum entries explaining how to type unicode characters on Mac. However, they were for older versions of Mac OS so I am making a version with plenty of screenshots to show you how to do it on Mac OS Yosemite.

First you have to enable Unicode Hex Input on your system:

Step 1: open system preferences:

Step 2: open keyboard preferences:

Step 3: select the Input Sources Tab:

Step 4: click the + button:

Step 5: select Others from the languages (scroll to the very bottom):

Step 6: select Unicode Hex Input (it will probably be the only choice):

Step 7: click the Add button:

You should now see a little language flag on your menu bar at the very top right of your screen:

While in TextEdit (or almost any other application you can click on the flag and select Unicode Hex Input (Sorry, I can't make a screen capture of actually doing it.)

You will then see the flag replaced with the Unicode Hex symbol:

To add a unicode symbol to your TextEdit document just hold down the option key and type the 4 digit unicode hex, then release the option key. The unicode symbol should appear. In this example I typed 2119 which is a Blackboard Bold uppercase P: