142 MACWORLD AUGUST 2021
HELPDESK MAC 911front_door.jpeg (capital L)
To unlock a file: SetFile -a l
front_door.jpeg (lowercase l)
PUT EMOJI, MATH, AND OTHER
SYMBOLS AT YOUR
FINGERTIPS WITH A CUSTOM
MAC SOFTWARE KEYBOARD
Podcasters and sound engineers often put
together what’s called a “soundboard,” a
collection of frequently used short audio
clips that they can trigger with a click.
Sometimes these are used for humorous
purposes, such as on “morning zoo” radio
shows, but you also find them used in aural
gameshows (for right and wrong answers)
and for quick access to transition music.
Some people need the equivalent of a
“soundboard” for keyboard symbols.
Modern fonts can contain tens of
thousands of unique characters (or
“glyphs”). A large portion correspond to
glyphs used in scripts (like the Latin script
for most of Western Europe and the
Americas, and Devanagari used in a large
number of southeast Asian languages). But
there are piles of specialized symbols for
math, phonetics, currency, and, yes, there
are emoji.
I’ve written before about Character
Viewer (fave.co/36bMXE3), a macOS
floating palette that provides easy access
to individual symbols, including a search
option. But what if you routinely use a set
of symbols, such as for math or logic? The
viewer requires a lot of scrolling and
clicking.
The answer is a free
third-party tool, Ukelele
(fave.co/2TFQvMd), from
SIL International, a global
organization devoted to
preserving ethnolinguistic
diversity—helping groups
of all sizes keep the
languages and scripts that
were suppressed by
governments or are used
by relatively few living
speakers vibrant with
support from technology.
Ukelele is one of thoseThe Character Viewer gives you straightforward but tediously
arranged access to symbols and other characters.