Greek letter shortcuts in Keynote 6.5

Question

I recently switched to Keynote for writing scientific talks. I use tons of greek letters and need a fast way to type them in. I have seen on other questions and forums that people just change the auto-correct settings to replace things like \lambda with the Greek letter. However, in Keynote 6.5 I cant seem to find the auto-correct settings to do this. Its looks like they moved it out of the preferences menu. Anyone know where this is, or have another solution?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 23 '15 at 20:26

Using the Keyboard System Preference, in combination with the Greek keyboard, I was able to get this to work.

Open System Preferences > Keyboard

Select the Keyboard tab and check Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar. The flag of your default language should now appear to the right of the Date/Time menu item.

Select the Input Sources tab > Add Greek keyboard

Select the Text tab > select then add \lambda to the Replace field

From the Character Viewer menu bar item, choose the Greek keyboard > Select the With field and type the 'l' key. This should insert the λ character in this field.

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From the Character ViewSwitch back to the default keyboard.

Now, whenever you type \lambda you will see this replacement pop-up:

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Repeat with other characters.

This worked great. Only weird thing for me was when I checked 'Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar', it showed some other symbol that brought up some sort of softKey window. Then when I unchecked this box the American flag popped up and everything worked as described. Maybe due to some other setting I have on somewhere. Thanks! — Robmotron, Mar 24 '15 at 15:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 07 '21 at 18:33

Another way is to modify whichever of /System/Library/Input\ Methods/PressAndHold.app/Contents/PlugIns/PAH_Extension.appex/Contents/Resources/Keyboard*.plist your keyboard is using. See also How to add characters to the press and hold character picker in OS X Lion?

Unfortunately, this requires disabling SIP, and you should save a copy to install again every time an OS update cancels your changes. I updated mine to allow me to easily do pīnyīn along with a few other Polish/greek/French characters. But changing the one in /Library (not SIP-protected) didn't work, and the one in /System/Library was overwritten by the next O.S. update.

Greek letter shortcuts in Keynote 6.5

2 Answers2