Keyboard Layouts
You can add the Romanian layout and switch to it easily enough, but the default setup for this is to change the keyboard layout across all apps. I actually prefer this behaviour (I use the Dvorak layout) but it is problematic when you're trying to type / and you get ă because you forgot to switch your layout back.
Character Palette
The Edit menu in (almost) every app has an entry at the bottom called Special Characters... This, of course, allows you to see all the different characters you could possibly want to add. Wonderful! But I only need four on a regular basis, so scrolling through them becomes tiresome.
Favorites in Character Palette
Once you find the character you're interested in whilst using the Character Palette, you may notice a little gear icon (bottom left). Clicking this reveals a pretty handy menu item, Add to Favorites. This adds the selected character to the Favorites Tab. Wonderful! Now you've got the four or five characters you really care about at your disposal. So you can go to Edit > Special Characters... and pick the one you want.
Note: The tab you've selected stays selected, so you always get your Favorite Characters when you open the dialog.
But what if you're a shortcut junkie and you don't want to use the mouse?
Shortcut?
There's a shorcut! It's Alt+Cmd+T. That brings up the Character Viewer. This is good - I like shortcuts. However, it's not so good when I'm typing an email in Outlook 2011 because Alt+Cmd+T is assigned to Mark All Read. That's bad. So I can't use the shortcut that's common to most other apps in the only app that I actually want to use the shortcut in. Bother.
Override!
In System Preferences you can set keyboard shortcuts. I tried to set up a global application shortcut, but it still didn't work in Outlook because Outlook already had that assignment for something else (Mark All Read). I guess setting the shortcut for All Applications wasn't good enough for Outlook. However, if you set the shortcut specifically for Outlook, the mapping charges and presto - you've got the same shortcut in Outlook that you have in all the other apps.
Now I can happily type away using my Dvorak layout and put in the occasional special character without too much hassle. I still have to double-click the character to insert it, but it's less movement so I'm basically happy with the arrangement.
Bucurați-vă de.
