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Font Fatigue: The Character Palette
(taken from www.creativepro.com)
By  Chuck Weger, creativepro.com contributing editor

Do you miss KeyCaps?? Well try the Character Palette in OS X.

The Character Palette in Mac OS X is a very cool font viewer and character selector -- sort of like KeyCaps on steroids (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Unfortunately, for some reason Apple made it very hard to get to initially. After you "install" it, it shows up in the menu bar of every non-Classic application (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Here's how to activate the Character Palette on your system: Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu (or the Dock), then click on the "International" preference (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

In this window, click the "Input Menu" tab. You'll see a list of every possible input method installed in your system. Click the checkbox for "Character Palette" and you should see a little flag appear in the menu bar; in my system, it's a U.S. flag, but it depends on your primary language. That's it; you can quit System Preferences, and from then on the Character Palette menu will be in your menu bar.