Permanent Character Map?

[S.Holdsworth]

Hello,

I have just updated my old Safari Lion to Sierra and to my horror I found that the "Special Character" window from Finder which always stayed open in the old system and thus was a handy shortcut use for all applications no longer stays up. Now I find that for every special character in a Open Office document I have to go through the laborious rigmarole of opening the character map, taking ages to identify the character I want and click on it. As a German teach this is totally impracticable considering how many special characters there are in any one German text!!!

Is there an easier way in the new system?

I'd be VERY grateful for constructive answers - but please no computer jargon; plain English please...

[lgusaas]

Open System Preferences. Click on Keboard.
Check the box beside "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar"
Click on the icon in your menu bar and you can open the keyboard or character viewers. They will stay open until you close them.

[S.Holdsworth]

The box is checked and that's how it's worked in the past. Now with OS Sierra, the "emoji viewers" only stay open with certain applications such as "Finder", "Safari" and the like, but *not* for Open Office.

Also, with the old system, the character map could be "pushed" into a corner, half obscured, so it doesn't take much space. The new windows are huge and intrusive and insist on aligning with the screen frame.

Any solution?

[lgusaas]

The box is checked and that's how it's worked in the past. Now with OS Sierra, the "emoji viewers" only stay open with certain applications such as "Finder", "Safari" and the like, but *not* for Open Office.

Also, with the old system, the character map could be "pushed" into a corner, half obscured, so it doesn't take much space. The new windows are huge and intrusive and insist on aligning with the screen frame.

Any solution?

Character/emoji viewers stay open in Apache OpenOffice for me. The window size can be adjusted, although the smallest size is fairly large. I can push the character map off screen.

I don't have any solution since I don't have any problem. Check your "System Preferences" settings since it is a Mac problem, not an AOO problem.

PS: Your signature says you have OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 installed. That is very old. The latest version is Apache OpenOffice 4.1.3
Upgrade at http://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html

[S.Holdsworth]

Thank you agin for your reply. In the meantime I had upgraded my OpenOffice to 4.1.3. and it's still the same problem - even after rebooting the computer a few times.

Could there be any settings in OpenOffice which make the Character Maps vanish?

[MrProgrammer]

Hi, and welcome to the forum. I use Mac OS X 10.9.5. I suspect, but do not know, that the Option key works the way I'll describe in Sierra too.

As a German teach this is totally impracticable considering how many special characters there are in any one German text!!!

I don't need to use German, but when I need special characters for Spanish or French I mostly use the Option key, not the Character Viewer.
Special characters insertion (for French and Spanish)
For German you will want to learn Option u (Umlaut) plus a/o/u to get ä/ö/ü and Option s to get ß. If these are the types of "special characters" you need, I believe you will find it much faster to use the Option key than to use the Character Viewer dialog. Read about using the Option key for entering special characters in Apple's "Help" system.

If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit button and add [Solved] to the start of the title. You can select the green checkmark icon at the same time.

[S.Holdsworth]

Thank you. I'm not sure if that solves the problem, but at least there is a slightly less dramatic way of creating the umlauts and some of the other characters I regularly use - but unfortunately not all of them. I just wished that the character/emoji map would be visible when the OpenOffice window is open.
Any suggestions why, in spite of having all settings according to everyone's recommendation, it still doesn't work?