Glyphs Galore

Client Notes

Over the last couple weeks, I helped Rebecca start down the path of cleaning up her email and passwords, explored document triage and organization with Shulamit, and continued to build out Leigh’s home Wi-Fi experience in hopes that more eero nodes would give her reliable access in the garden.

I also troubleshooted some email oddities with Jesse & Eli, started a more frequent coaching relationship with Ron, explored a number of shortcuts and opportunities for efficiency with John, and recommended a new external display to Michael.

Visual Feedback

One of the boons of Apple’s software is its attention to visual details and permitting users interpret meaning through multiple facets. When Apple first introduced SF Symbols to developers, Paulo shared:

Symbols play a very important role in interfaces. They are effective at communicating meaning. They can indicate which items you have selected. They can be used to visually differentiate one type of content from another.

If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of this application, check out its dedicated section in the Human Interface Guidelines.

Glyphs for Challenged Readers

Glyphs may also benefit folks who have reading disabilities. As you peruse the menu bar in macOS 26, you’ll find that most of the icons that prefix menu items are unique, each representing a specific command. For example, in Notes, you’ll see three variations of the paste command: Paste, Paste and Match Style, Paste and Retain Style.

The uniqueness isn’t universal, though. I discovered that  appears next to the About command at the top of the application menu as well as the Finder’s File > Get Info command.

However, users will still benefit from consistency of meaning throughout the operating system. For example, it’s helpful to see  both as the User menu on the right side of the menu bar for switching users and the Log Out command in the  menu.

Copy Glyphs as Images

The glyphs included in SF Symbols may appear along with text in a paragraph and you can freely paste them in many applications on your Mac, like Notes, Journal, and Pages.

However, these won’t translate to websites, which don’t have the San Francisco typefaces in their arsenal, as well as some third-party applications like Microsoft Word. Plus, if you share a note or document with someone who doesn’t have the needed font, they might not see your embedded glyphs either.

Therefore, to insert a glyph, I recommend you copy it from SF Symbols as an image, resize if needed, and add it to your document, website, etc. In HTML, you can size an image to match the text height using height: 1em; in the img tag’s style attribute.

You’ll find Copy Image in the Edit menu as well as in the contextual menu when you right-click on a symbol. If you want this command to produce an image of a particular maximum size to reduce pixelation, choose your specs in the Copy Image As… dialog first. (Note: 100 points at a scale of 1 = 128 pixels.)