In FontBook, go to preferences and make sure you choose to make new fonts available for the computer. This will give system wide access. If you have mutliple accounts, and fonts are installed for a particular user, you can't use them.

and if you have time - read that: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301332

Open Text Edit.
Select Edit>Special Characters.
In the View menu, select 'Glyph' and from the menu below that choose 'Glyph Catalog'.
In the Fonts menu, select Apple Symbols. The complete glyph palette appears.

To enter a character in Text Edit, double-click the glyph in the glyph palette. Alternatively, single-click the Character Info panel or drag-and-drop into the document.

This also works for Arial Hebrew and Baghdad.

This feature can also be accessed from the Fonts Panel. It's very clever stuff, but I wish it was simpler.

Ian

Thanks both of you for your replies.

Parker -I am the only user of the computer, and so I don't think it matters whether it's in the user folder or the computer library folder; however, I did check and the fonts in question are in the computer library folder. The article was interesting because I have turned off some of those other language fonts - I didn't know I was installing them and anyway I can't use them - and even though it says in the article I'd be unable to disable some of the necessary ones, I seem to be able to. Hm. Hope I'm not messing something up.

Blairyo - thanks, that did work for Text Edit but I still have no ability to use those fonts in my Adobe software.

I went to the Applestore to ask them about it, and totally stumped them too! We looked at their computers and those fonts were either not available (in certain software) or available as options but when you selected them and tried to type, nothing typed out. Very mysterious. Are you both able to use those particular fonts in a variety of applications?

Hi Shortcake,
It seems that a program that supports the OSX text engine (and/or Unicode) is required to access the glyphs in Apple Symbols. The font has some strange behavior. For example,

Type a word in an OSX app such as Text Edit, Pages, Intaglio or EazyDraw.
Insert an Apple Symbol character in the middle of the word.
Select All and change the font. The letters change shape, but the Apple Symbol is untouched! Why isn't it replaced by an oblong box? Intriguing…

As you said, the font is not available in every application and it's sometimes listed at the top of the fonts menu, not at the bottom, as in Text Edit and Pages, etc.

The closest I can get to your experience is Expression 3.3. Expression runs in OSX (it doesn't need Classic to start), but the Font Panel and Special Characters panel are inaccessible. When you type the alphabet and numerals and choose Apple Symbols, you get oblong boxes.

Adobe software runs on top of OSX, but their programs use their own built-in text engine. You may be able to access Apple Symbols via InDesign's character pallette.

In the 10.4 Finder, Apple Symbols is described as a Windows TrueType font with a .TTF suffix. There are no Typographic features, which suggests that it's a 'plain' TTF—not a Microsoft OpenType font. When the font is opened in Fontographer, the standard character slots (0-255, Mac encoding) are empty, which probably explains Expression's oblong boxes.

This can of worms has the smell of Unicode about it. The PDF below describes Apple Symbols as a 'generic font that makes available many of the symbolic/non-linguistic characters from the UNICODE character set'. The PDF is not designed for Mac OS users, but it could be helpful.

homepage.mac.com/atl/tex/AppleSymbols.pdf

Every one of the 1167 glyphs in Apple Symbols have Unicodes, so if you know the Unicode input method, you may be able to access the glyphs by typing the Unicode values.

What a mess!

Ian

The fonts being discussed here don't have any glyphs within the range of Latin characters. So when you "access" them, what that would mean in some cases is inputing text with one of the non-English input methods. A keystroke is mapped to a different Unicode area to display a particular glyph. (forgive me if my terminology is not perfect here, I'm not a professional type designer) In the case of Arabic and Hebrew support, there are also considerations for the fact that text is right to left. I'm not sure if this is obvious or not. I opened Symbol.dfont in FontLab and could see that while there are glyphs for numbers, there are none for letters. It's possible that Mac OS somehow detects that an active font isn't applicable to a given input method and hides it. (wild speculation here) It may have been previously discussed on this site that there is another Mystery Font in /System/Library/Fonts called LastResort.dfont. It contains dummy glyphs, black boxes with unicode range indicators, to fill space when a particular Unicode glyph is unavailable in the system. As far as I know, it doesn't appear in any font menu, ever. Of course the Character Pallette provides a nice interface to interact with some otherwise inaccessible type.

You can access the "Apple symbols" font in Adobe Illustrator CS from the TYPE menu. Select the insertion point in your text, then select the TYPE menu (top of the screen) and select GLYPHS, scroll to the character you want and double click and the charactor will be inserted into your text. Hope this helps!

Okay, since nobody has given the correct answer here, I'll chip in. There are about a dozen different ways a piece of software can iterate through fonts installed on your computer. Most modern apps, including virtually all Cocoa software, any Carbon software that exclusively uses ATSUI, and most apps that use the Carbon Font Manager call the OS to give them a list of "available fonts". That list is composed exclusively of Unicode-compatible fonts, that is either fonts that declare Unicode codepages, or that declare a known encoding which OS X can convert to Unicode. Baghdad unfortunately, whilst it has its cmap table vectored correctly with Unicode codepoints, fails to declare any supported Unicode ranges, Windows codepages, its sequencing character set (if any), nor is it encapsulated within a suitcase with an appropriate FOND script ID associated. Mac OS X therefore turns a blind eye to it and deems it unsuitable for Unicode (since it cannot presume the glyphs at cmap IDs 600 to 6FF are really Arabic). Arial Hebrew is the same (though vectored from 590 to 5FF).
These fonts are included because they can and are used by software that is not Unicode aware, and ignores the fonts cmap, simply treating them as a MacArabic, CP1255 or whatever font. You will usually find, especially for the CE and CY versions of fonts, that their parent font now included the characters in the correct unicode positions (e.g. Courier CY has been superseded by adding Cyrillic glyphs to Courier).

The purpose of Apple Symbols is to provide a fallback font for glyphs which are not available in any other font (not counting LastResort). If you have a character sequence such as "0068 0069 0020 263A" (hi ☺) and you set the font, then if your new font doesn't have a glyph for U+263A, *and* the application has font substitution enabled (it's on by default for ATSUI/Cocoa apps), then the OS will search for a font which has a glyph for that character, and display that glyph instead of an empty box. If it cannot find a matching glyph, one from the LastResort font is matched and returned. This is why the character ☺ will always be displayed using Apple Symbols.
As to why it's not appearing in your apps, that stumps me, as it shows up in TextEdit here!

– Nicholas