Open the app/website/service where you want to enter text and place the cursor in the input field. Click on the text icon and type in the desired. Locate the file and open it with Preview. The ALT key and the Option key are the same thing but confusingly, on many European keyboards the word Alt doesn't.
#Ios mac text edit ceyboard shortcut for en dash how to
Alt/Option-G = © If you want to type the Registered Trademark symbol less Option/Alt and R How To Type On Mac: Useful Tips If you're not sure which region or country your keyboard is from, check Apple's list of keyboard localizations. If you want to type a © you need to press Alt/Option and G.
The C key is the home of various accented Cs. So it's kind of just a given rule now on computing that you use the hyphen when you mean minus even though technically it's a different character.īut as far as the en dash and the em dash if you're worried about grammar in the rest of what you type you should probably look into using these characters in the Option, hyphen for the en dash and the Shift, Option, hyphen for the em dash and using them in your text as well as the rest of all the grammar rules that you follow.Home How to type on Mac How to type Æ, €, #, © and more special characters on a Ma In fact when doing work on a computer and wanting to perform calculations in Spotlight or Calculator or whatever you're using the hyphen as the minus key anyway. But on a computer, in almost all fonts even if there is a minus character included, the hyphen and the minus character are indistinguishable.
For instance in typesetting there's actually a slightly different character for using a minus like in a mathematical formula. So there are actually even more than this but these are the ones typically used. Now there are some other uses for the em dash. So you don't need any extra space and in most grammar guides I see that you're not supposed to put any extra space around the em dash. This is because, in most fonts, the em dash actually includes a little bit of extra space to the left or right. Now notice I didn't put any extra spaces around the em dash. So a hyphen is just pressing the hyphen key. Now to type the em dash you hold the Option and the Shift key down. The quick brown fox-though he looks more red than brown to me-jumps over the lazy dog. What's the em dash used for? Well, it's used basically just like parentheses or as an aside in some text. n is a shorter letter and m is twice of an n in width so that's the em dash. This is a wider dash and you can guess from the name that it's supposed to be the width of the letter m, rather than the letter n. That's pretty much what you use the en dash for. Option and hyphen gives you the en dash, a longer one. So notice the regular hyphen how short that is. This gives you a different character than the regular hyphen. How do you type the en dash? Well you hold the Option key down on your keyboard and you press the hyphen key. So, for instance, if you want to say seven to ten you could say 7 and then the en dash to 10. You use this in cases where you're going to have a range of things. It's called en dash because the dash is about the size, the width, of the letter n. It's usually spelled en although there's some debate on how to actually write down the word en dash. So the first type of dash I want to talk about is called the en dash. But there are other places you would be using a dash. Those are the only places you should be using a hyphen. So when you see a hyphenated name you would use the hyphen. It's also used to separate numbers in things like telephone numbers. But if you do make sure you just type the plain normal hyphen that's on your keyboard. Now, sometimes, depending upon which dictionary you're using, you may not use a hyphen on any of these. It's usually to the right of the zero on American keyboards and is the correct one of use. So, for instance, you may want to type a compound word like this, well-liked, and using the hyphen on your keyboard. Many of us use the hyphen for all of the different dashes. One of them, the one we use most often, is actually not even called a dash. There are three different types of dashes. Now this is one thing when talking about letters and words. Video Transcript: So whether writing a book, an email, or text message a lot of us like to be grammatically correct when typing on our computers. Check out How and When To Type En and Em Dashes On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.