How to Write Unicode Characters on a Mac

A friend of mine posted a method to write glyphs for ﷺ and ﷻ in Microsoft Word, on Facebook recently. Inspired by that, I investigated how to do the same on a Windows or Mac OS X machine in general.

These two glyphs correspond to Unicode characters U+FDFA and U+FDFB respectively.

On Windows, it is fairly simple; you just hold down the Alt key and type F, D, F and A (or B) to get the desired glyph.

On Mac OS X, the process is slightly more involved. Here's how I did it on my Mac.

First, enable the Input menu to gain access to the Character Viewer utility application. To do this, type "Keyboard" in Spotlight to bring up the Keyboard preferences.

Enable the option Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar towards the bottom of the window, on the first tab named Keyboard.

Next, switch to the last tab named Input Sources and enable the option Show Input menu in the menu bar.

After doing the above, we will add the two glyphs to our favorites for easy access. We can do this by searching for them in Character Viewer and adding to our favorites in there.

Launch the Character Viewer from the Input menu on the menu bar.

Search for the glyph for U+FDFA in Character Viewer, select it, and then add it to the Favorites by clicking on the Add to Favorites button.

Repeat the process for the glyph for U+FDFB.

All of the above is a one-time process; once this is done, it doesn't need to be done again.

To insert the glyphs into text that you are typing in an application, just select the Edit menu and from under that, Special Characters... to get access to the glyphs you added to your Favorites in the previous steps.