Have you noticed the the Symbol and Dingbat fonts don't work in Cocoa applications? Do you want them to work? Do you wonder why they don't work when you select one and start typing?
The following solution is courtesy of Vasantha Crabb, who has written an excellent introduction to multiple language support on OS X. Even though I'm a US-centric OS X user, I found it quite interesting. I've put a PDF version of Vasantha's OS X Multiple Language Support guide on my iDisk; if you have any interest in how non-English languages are handled in OS X, give it a read.
To enable Dingbats and Symbol fonts in Cocoa apps, open your System Preferences panel and click the International icon. On the International preference pane, click on Keyboard Menu. Look for Symbol and Dingbats in the keyboard list and place a checkmark next to each. Click the Options button and make sure that command-option-space for switching layouts is checked.
Open a Cocoa application, hit command-option-space until you see either the Symbol or the Dingbat keybard icon in your menubar, and start typing. You should now see Symbol/Dingbat characters onscreen!
If you'd like a brief explanation as to why you need to do this, read the rest of the article. I've snipped a bit of Vasantha's guide that talks specifically about the Dingbat and Sybmol fonts in Cocoa apps ... for the full story, though, read his guide.
Vasantha writes:
Now on to the specifics of the different flavours of applications. Cocoa applications deal with all text using a system called Unicode. Unicode can represent text from almost any script ever used on the earth. The script the text is supposed to be displayed in is implied. This may not mean much, but it'll be important later. In Cocoa applications the setting of Font and keyboard synchronization has no effect. It only affects Carbon applications. In a Cocoa application, the application will try to select a font to suit the script you type in. For instance, if I am typing in English in Helvetica, then switch to Japanese in TextEdit, the font will switch to Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, a hard, angular Japanese font. However, if I was typing English in Times, and switched to Japanese, TextEdit would choose a more cursive Japanese, Hiragino Mincho Pro. So in Cocoa, the font is chosen to suit the script, and an attempt is made to keep the overall "lookâ? of the fonts consistent between scripts. If you select some text and then try to change it to a font that doesn't support it, the most similar font that does support it will be used.I continue to be amazed at the number of things in OSX of which I have zero knowledge...
This brings us to those two new keyboard layouts: Symbol and Dingbats. Why are they needed? The answer is this fancy font selection setup. Symbol is obviously not a Roman font, it's purely for mathematical symbols. If you select the Symbol font in a Cocoa application and try typing with a Roman keyboard layout selected (Australian, French, US, whatever), the font will change back to something else pretty soon (try it yourself and see).
So to type mathematical symbols, you select the Symbol layout, and then type as though you had selected the Symbol font and US keyboard layout selected in a previous version of Mac!OS. The same concept applies with the Dingbats layout, for the Zapf Dingbats font.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20011119112233675