fontinternationalizationmacosunicode
I guess everybody here knows about the character palette of Mac OS X.
Is it possible to create a new symbol, using an image or a vectorial shape made in Illustrator, and add it to the character palette? If so, a brief outline of how this would work would be ideal since I'd like to actually do this to extend my Mac's usable characters with some custom designs.
After you choose the character go to the Font Variation section you might need to click on the triangle at its left side to expand this. This shows the fonts that include the glyph.
For Snow Leopard, the only way (AFAIK) to re-order favorites characters is to make it in the plist file located in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.CharacterPaletteIM.plist
As you can see on the screenshot below, there's an array called "CharPaletteFavorites" containing multiple dictionaries (one by character). Just re-order them when the character palette is closed, save and that's it !
To open the plist, you can use Xcode or any text editor as it is basically XML.
(It is the same solution as posted by bmike, but for Snow Leopard. The only difference is the name of the array containing special chars.)
Best Answer
The character palette simply gives you access to the characters in the fonts on your system. To add something to it, you need to create a font with that character in it or add the character to an existing font. Common font creation tools for OS X are Fontlab and Fontforge. There are also some online services that may work (use Google to find them).