There's a keyboard viewer stashed away in a very unintuitive place. These instructions assume you are using OS X English, but include steps for both Leopard and Snow Leopard (versions 10.5.x and 10.6.x respectively). Click the footnote links to jump to the screenshots below. <ol> Select "System Preferences..." from the Apple in the top-left corner. In Leopard, select the "International" icon in the top row (in Snow Leopard, it's called "Language & Text") In Leopard, select the "Input Menu" page. In the list on that page, you can enable the "Keyboard viewer".<fn> An icon with the Flag representing your current input format (probably US English or Swiss German) shows up in the menu bar at the top-right of the screen. (In Snow Leopard, the page is called "Input Sources" and the item in the list is labeled as "Keyboard and Character Viewer".<fn>) Click the newly enabled icon in the menu bar to show a menu of options.<fn><fn> Select "Show Keyboard Viewer" to show a virtual keyboard.<fn> Press the "alt/option", "Command" and "Control" keys both alone and in combination to see what effects they have. </ol> But wait, there's more! If you need to make an accented character not directly supported by your keyboard, you can use some special key combinations to insert a "floating" diacritical mark<fn>; that mark is automatically applied to the next character you type (within the capabilities of the selected font and encoding, of course). <ul> <kbd>Alt/Option+u</kbd>: Umlaut (e.g. ä, ë, ï, ö, ü) <kbd>Alt/Option+e</kbd>: Acute (e.g. á, é, í, ó, ú) <kbd>Alt/Option+`</kbd>: Grave (e.g. à, è, ì, ò, ù) <kbd>Alt/Option+i</kbd>: Circumflex (e.g. â, ê, î, ô, û) <kbd>Alt/Option+n</kbd>: Tilde (e.g. ã, õ, ñ) </ul> <h>Screenshots</h> <ft><img src="{att_link}keyboard_viewer_option.png" href="{att_link}keyboard_viewer_option.png" class="frame" caption="Image 1: Input Options (Leopard)" scale="50%"></ft> <ft><img src="{att_link}snow_leopard_input_options.png" href="{att_link}snow_leopard_input_options.png" class="frame" caption="Image 2: Input Options (Snow Leopard)" scale="50%"></ft> <ft><img src="{att_link}select_keyboard_viewer.png" class="frame" caption="Image 3: Select Keyboard Viewer (Leopard)"></ft> <ft><img src="{att_link}snow_leopard_show_keyboard_viewer.png" align="none" class="frame" caption="Image 4: Select Keyboard Viewer (Snow Leopard)"></ft> <ft><img src="{att_link}keyboard_viewer.png" href="{att_link}keyboard_viewer.png" align="none" class="frame" caption="Keyboard Viewer" scale="50%"></ft> <hr> <ft>Only Western diacritical marks are supported, as far as I know.</ft>