Friday Software Spotlight: PopChar
posted in Software, Macintosh |
A post over at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, for the acronymically challenged), highlights a new widget called CharacterPal, which allows you to find glyphs and other special characters with relative ease. It reminded me of a Classic Mac OS utility I used called PopChar, so I shuffled on over to The Google to see if it still existed, and if so, if it was updated for Mac OS X. It does, and it was.
PopChar is a menu bar utility, but the menu item lives in the far upper left-hand corner of the screen, to the top and left of the Apple menu. When you click the relatively unobtrusive P icon, the PopChar window appears, allowing you to select the character you wish to insert into the active application. This “&” was inserted in this way: while typing this blog entry in Firefox, I simply clicked on the P, clicked the “insert HTML button,” and clicked the ampersand in the main window. PopChar disappeared, and the HTML code for the ampersand was in my post. The next time I invoked the utility, PopChar remembered all of my most recent selections, including that I wanted to insert the HTML code for the character.
PopChar supports both ASCII and Unicode fonts, and I’m just technically illiterate enough to not really know what that means from an everyday use standpoint. But as you can see from the screenshot, all of my active fonts appeared in both a drop-down list and a drawer that you can close if you choose. In addition to HTML, you can also insert Plain Text or Formatted Text. I haven’t tested this extensively, but the basics work as you would expect, for a variety of my most commonly used applications, such as Firefox, Mail.app, TextEdit, TextMate, Pages, and Word.
Two of the most useful features to me are the ability to choose from all of the characters or my most recent ones and the search feature. Again, PopChar remembers your last settings whether you clicked on a character to insert it or not, so Recent Characters will always be front-and-center if it’s the last thing you viewed. After initial installation, you might want to open a blank text document, and sequentially choose a whole series of the most common glyphs and symbols you use. Whenever you activate PopChar, you’ll have your own, customized list of characters you are most likely to need (at least until you change from Recent to All Characters again).
When searching for the HTML of the “&” symbol in my previous example, I typed “amp” into the search field, and my choice of characters narrowed with each letter I typed until the ampersand was the only character showing. The search worked for a wide variety of examples, including trademark, registered (trademark), copyright, parenthesis, bracket (for which there multiple styles), and even tilde (~), which not only showed the character itself, but also any character that used a tilde, such as “Ã.” You can even get left versions of parenthesis, brackets and quotes by typing “left.”
Another useful feature is PopChar’s ability to display characters in the selected font. Unlike Microsoft Word and other applications, where displaying font menus in the fonts themselves can be painfully slow, the feature doesn’t appear to affect PopChar’s performance. So, you can even use PopChar to preview and select a font style instead of launching Font Book, Linotype FontExplorer X, or another font utility.
PopChar is the very powerful, easy-to-use utility I remember. If you’re a writer, editor, designer or graphics production artist, it would likely make your life much easier. While many may not like the menu bar position, I do, perhaps if only because it harkens back to when I used PopChar in classic versions of the Mac OS. I only have two quibbles with the software. First, while PopChar is extremely easy to use, the users’ guide paints a different story. It makes things appear far more difficult to use. Ergonis, the company that makes the software, needs to create a separate Quick Start Guide, which if done correctly, would be a simple graphic or one-page set of instructions. It really is that simple.
Secondly, in this day-and-age of readily available freeware and shareware, $29.99 seems to be a steep price to pay. Then again, if you only need to find special characters every so often, the aforementioned CharacterPal might just be the ticket. For the professionals or active amateurs, including all the bloggers out there, PopChar will likely pay for itself by reducing the hassle factor alone.
The bottom-line? If you are a writer, either by trade or hobby, or you work with text a lot, PopChar is an outstanding utility for finding just the right character for the job. I give it 4.5 stars out of 5.
Other posts you might be interested in...