There is a keystroke to turn on the character pallet, but as far as I know, there is no keystroke to turn it off.
Did you try the directions I posted previously? The problem is that I think the Character Palette can be turned on without enabling the special Text Input menu.
I don't remember exactly what the keystroke to activate it is, but it's something like vo-right bracket or vo-shift-right brace, or something similar.
According to the documentation, there is: Move to a floating window (palette) Control-F6 and Show or hide the Character Palette Command-Option-T But those seem to be very unreliable. Even worse, in TextEdit (or certain other programs) Command-Option-T opens the Palette but will not close it. I can post the directions for enabling the special Input menu if that would be helpful.
