Of course, if you’re really French (for example), you’ll also want to make these changes:

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Draw Those Chinese Characters

Apple has made a huge push to appeal to Chinese Mac fans. There’s a new Chinese dictionary and improved text input; eight new Chinese fonts; compatibility with popular Chinese mail services like QQ, 163, and 126; built-in Safari searching using Baidu (like a Chinese Google); and Share-button posting directly to Youku and Tudou (like YouTube) and Sina Weibo (a microblogging service).

If you want to write in Chinese, you can draw the characters you want, right on your laptop’s trackpad. (This trick requires a recent Mac laptop, one of the multitouch models.)

To set this up, turn on Chinese–Simplified or Chinese–Traditional, choose the Chinese writing system you prefer, and then turn on Trackpad Handwriting in the System Preferences→Language & Text→Input Sources pane.

Then, when you’re actually writing, use the flag (Input) menulet to choose Pinyin—Simplified (or whichever system you like). Now press Shift-Control-space bar to make the writing panel appear, as shown here.

The trick is to understand that the panel is a full map of your trackpad. Draw your character by dragging across the trackpad; white lines appear as you go.

On both sides of the onscreen panel, you see the Mac’s interpretations of your character; to choose one, tap the corresponding spot on the outside edges of your actual trackpad. (Or, to backspace—delete your most recent line—tap the upper-left corner of your trackpad.) The Mac drops the character into your document.

Press Shift-Control-space bar again to hide the panel, and shake your head in wonder.

While the Mac can display many different languages, typing in those languages is another matter. The symbols you use when you’re typing in Swedish aren’t the same as when you’re typing in English. Apple solved this problem by creating different keyboard layouts, one for each language. Each rearranges the letters that appear when you press the keys. For example, when you use the Swedish layout and press the semicolon key, you don’t get a semicolon (;)—you get an ö.

Apple even includes the famous Dvorak layout and the not-very-famous Colemak layout. Both are scientific rearrangements of the standard layout that put the most common letters directly under your fingertips on the home row. Fans of the Dvorak layout, and the more modern Colemak layout, claim greater accuracy, better speed, and less fatigue.

Use the list in the Input Sources pane to indicate which keyboard layout you want. If you select anything in the list, then “Show input menu in menu bar” turns on automatically. That option puts a tiny flag icon in your menu bar—a keyboard menulet that lets you switch from one layout to another just by choosing its name. (To preview a certain keyboard arrangement, launch the Keyboard Viewer program described next.)

There you are, two-thirds of the way through your local matchmaker newsletter, when it hits you that you need a heart symbol. Right now.

You can’t help wishing there were an easy way to find those special symbols that hide among your fonts—fancy brackets, math symbols, special stars and asterisks, and so on.

The Keyboard Viewer, described next, can generate a few of them. But to see the full range of symbols available, you need the Character Viewer. To make it appear, choose Edit→Special Characters.

Most programs have this command. If yours doesn’t, here’s the long way: Open System Preferences, click Language & Text, click the Input Sources tab, and then turn on the Keyboard & Character Viewer checkbox. You’ve just installed the Keyboard menulet.

Then, next time you’re word processing or doing page layout, choose Show Character Viewer from this menu. The resulting window (Figure 5-5, top) rounds up all symbols from all your fonts at once. To find a particular symbol, click the “by Category” tab, and then click the various category headings: Arrows, Bullets/Stars, Math Symbols, and so on.

When you find the symbol you want, double-click it. The correct symbol pops into your document. (If not, you may get the correct character in the wrong font. In that case, change the font of the inserted character manually. To find out what font it came from, click the symbol in the Font Variation panel to see the font name.)

Keyboard Viewer, which is descended from the Key Caps program of old, consists of a single window containing a tiny onscreen keyboard (Figure 5-5, bottom). When you hold down any of the modifier keys on your keyboard (like ⌘, Option, Shift, or Control), you can see exactly which keys produce which characters. The point, of course, is to help you learn which keys to press when you need special symbols or non-English characters, such as © or ñ, in each keyboard layout.

It’s a great tool—if you can find it.

Figure 5-5. Top: You can preview variations of the same symbol in the Font Variation panel. You can also use the search box to find a symbol by name: “heart” or “yen” or “asterisk,” for example. And if you click the menu in the top left, you can choose Customize List—and you’ll have access to a staggering array of even more symbol categories, including wacky symbols from other alphabets. Bottom: How do you make a π symbol? Keyboard Viewer reveals the answer. When you press the Option key, the Keyboard Viewer keyboard shows that the pi character (π) is mapped to the P key. To insert the symbol into an open document, just click it in the Keyboard Viewer window.

Here’s how. Open System Preferences→Language & Text, click Input Sources, and then turn on Keyboard & Character Viewer at the top of the list. The Input menulet—usually a tiny flag—appears at the top of the screen. You can open the Keyboard Viewer by choosing its name from this menulet.

To see the effect of pressing the modifier keys, either click the onscreen keys or press them on your actual keyboard. The corresponding keys on the onscreen keyboard light up as they’re pressed.