[Macworld]

Post your comments for PopChar X adds "reverse search" feature here

[MacTechAspen]

While I am sure this application makes it easier to do, the International preference pane's character palette will allow you to enter all sorts of nifty special characters.

[kimbarator]

Yes, the user comments on PopChar reviews go around and around on that issue. Many people say that it's crazy to pay this much for functionality that is largely provided for free by the OS.

Many others (and I'm one) have been willing to cough it up for what we find to be a better approach to quickly seeking out and inserting special symbols, obscure foreign characters, and other doodads into text and graphics projects.

[Kennethfcooper]

Also, the keyboard viewer shows you the keyboard keys and how they change when command, option, control, space, or any combination are held down. This can be faster when you want a character like an em dash ("–") or cent sign ("¢") for instance.

[kimbarator]

That's correct, but IMHO this tool is not really designed for such basic stuff as that. Keyboard viewer is indeed the best way to get a reminder that option-dash equals em-dash, option-v equals check mark, etc.

But when I'm doing oddball stuff, which is not so seldom, and I want to quickly pull up many symbol and character options from my font collection by shape-description ("star', "heart", "hand", "telephone", "dagger", "cube root") or character name (now where was that letter "thorn" again? And the Arabic "lam"?) then PopChar is the tool I prefer to use for finding and comparing the character forms available to me.

[whitedog]

If you don't need much help finding special characters, the Characters Palette will do the job most of the time. Personally, I've been using PopChar since OS 7 and have never regretted the occasional upgrade charge. The new feature that tags all fonts containing a specified character (right-click/Control-click the character to access the option in a contextual menu) alone is worth the upgrade price to me. Finding which fonts contain a specific special character has always been a hassle. PopChar now makes that process easy (the Character Palette has a similar function, but it's not nearly as simple to use). PopChar can also show the HTML code for special characters which can otherwise be nearly impossible to find.