Accents, emoji and special characters in Pages on Mac
You can insert special characters in text, including mathematical symbols, letters with accents and other diacritical marks, emoji, foreign language characters and more.
If you want to add an equation or expression to your document without performing a calculation, see Add mathematical equations.
Use the accent menu
Go to the Pages app
on your Mac.Open a document with text, click where you want to place the letter, then hold down that key on the keyboard to display the accent menu.
If the key doesn’t have any possible accents or other diacritical marks, the menu doesn’t appear.
In the menu, click the character you want to use.
You can also either press the number key shown for a mark or use the arrow keys to cycle through the marks, then press the Space bar to select one.
If a character is specific to a particular language, you may need to change your keyboard to the other language to see it. See Set up a keyboard or other input source for another language.
Use key combinations
If you often type characters with accents and other diacritical marks (such as á or ö), it may be quicker to use dead keys — a combination of keys that you press to enter a letter with a diacritical mark.
Go to the Pages app
on your Mac.Open a document with text, click where you want to place the letter, then press the dead key for the mark you want to add to a letter.
Press the letter.
For example, to enter â using the ABC keyboard layout, you press Option-i, then type a.
You can use the Keyboard Viewer to see the dead keys on your keyboard layout. For example, on the US keyboard layout, you can press the Option key, Shift key or both together to see the dead keys.
Add emoji
You can use the Character Viewer to add emoji and pictographs.
Go to the Pages app
on your Mac.Open a document with text, click where you want to place the emoji, then choose Edit > Emoji & Symbols (or press Control-Command-Space bar).
The Character Viewer appears where you clicked. You can drag it to the desktop if you want to keep it open as you work.
To locate an emoji, do any of the following:
Scroll to see more emoji or click the buttons at the bottom to jump to a category.
Scroll up, then type in the search field at the top (for example, type “flower” to see available flower emoji).
To see variations of an emoji — like different skin tones — click and hold the emoji in the viewer.
Click an emoji to insert it in the text.
For more information about using Character Viewer, see Use emoji and symbols on Mac.
Add special characters and symbols
You can use the full Character Viewer to add maths symbols, language scripts, code tables, braille patterns and more.
Go to the Pages app
on your Mac.Open a document with text, click where you want to place the character, then choose Edit > Emoji & Symbols (or press Control-Command-Space bar).
Drag the Character Viewer to your desktop, then click
.
To locate a character, do any of the following:
Scroll to see more characters or click the buttons on the left to jump to a category.
Note: To view more character options and customise the categories on the left, click
, then Customise List to select or deselect categories.Scroll up, then type in the search field at the top. For example, type “fractions” to see available fractions or type the Unicode name or code).
To see related characters or font variation of a selected symbol, click a special character, then scroll through the list in the right corner.
Double click a character to insert it in the text.
The Character Viewer always opens in the state it was in when it was last closed. Click in the top-right corner to close the expanded view.