One thing most of us don’t pay much attention to these days is special font characters, those accented letters and umlauts that have great meaning in many languages beyond English. Many of those special characters can be entered while you’re typing. All you have to remember are the proper keystroke combinations for each one.
Barring a photographic memory, there’s PopChar X, the Mac’s preeminent utility that inserts all those special characters and accented letters into documents. Any Mac user who is serious about properly accented fonts, knows about PopChar X.
Our Macs come with many built-in fonts, and applications tend to install even more. Most of those fonts have thousands of characters, and most of those are not easily accessed from the keyboard with PopChar X.
Click the P in the Menubar and here’s what you get.
PopChar X will display the font you’re currently using, but switching to a different font is merely a click.
The font preview function is extremely useful to page layout artists and designers and it makes it easier and faster to evaluate fonts, including display of characters and sample text fragments. The new Font Sheets also help to determine whether a specific font is useful.
Of course, PopChar X supports Unicode, handles searches, lets you create custom favorites, and also has a magnifier tool to ensure you’ve selected the proper accents.
My first use of PopChar was way back in the last century and it maintains a spot on the Mac of every designer or writer where special characters and accents are vital.
While I, too, have been using PopChar since the last century, your headline implies that this is a “management” application. It doesn’t manage fonts or character. It doesn’t let you regroup or set up anything. What it does do BRILLIANTLY is let you quickly and easily discover and input any character in any font.
Your title to this post is misleading.
Love PopChar. I, too, have been using it since the last century. As to the strange hair splitting guy who doesn’t know what ‘management’ means, PopChar actually helps you manage accents and special characters. It’s not a font manager, though.