Can't paste symbol from Character viewer in Mac to Photoshop

Question

This is extremely annoying:

I want to paste in a special symbol in Photoshop using the Character Viewer in Mac. I understand that there are some fonts that do not support these symbols, but when I paste this symbol in Photoshop, it appears as an unknown symbol (similar to this: ⊠ ), and I can't even change the font (to anything), it skips back to Myriad Pro.

I found a stupid solution to this: using the arrows to change fonts - this seems to work, but still Photoshop doesn't show all fonts that are available in Character Viewer under Font Variation

Have you experienced this? I can't remember if it was the same with Windows, but I know there were some bugs too.

Solution 1

I can confirm that Trey's answer is correct, although he didn't really offer much explanation as to why. Photoshop locks the font unless you select a font that supports the character - in this case, Lucida Grande supports pretty much every character available on OS X so your best bet is to paste the character, then switch the font to Lucida Grande. Good luck!

Edit: Also try Menlo (included in OS X 10.6 and up) if Lucida Grande doesn't have the character you're looking for.

Solution 2

Photoshop passive-aggressively prevents you from selecting a font that does not contain the selected character. This is a regression from earlier versions, which would change the font but go on displaying the "unsupported" box.

Regardless, you just need to select a font that does support the character. Mac's Character Viewer (which, humorously, is not available from Photoshop) will show you all fonts that support your character in the "Font Variation" section:

In this example, selecting GungSeo Regular in Photoshop would work fine.

If this insanity bothers you, maybe throw some love on the Adobe Feedback entry entry for a Glyphs panel like the one in Illustrator.

Solution 3

This won't work every time, but it has worked for me a few times when nothing else would. Try this:

Paste the Symbol from the Character Viewer into a word processing program (Word, OpenOffice, WordPerfect, Copy the symbol from the word processing program and paste it into Photoshop from there.

Solution 4

Try using Lucida Grande. It has a bunch of special characters.

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Comments

[Dex]

Hilarious. I have been at this for hours and this random font is the only one that worked to paste a simple star.