As a former user of Pop Char in Classic (stopped when it became shareware instead of donation-ware), has anyone looked at "Show Character Palette" included in Panther? It seems to do everything Pop Char did or most of what CharView professes to do. The main difference seems to be the GUI. Character Palette runs from the Menu Bar with some features under the "Unicode" heading in Services. My gut feeling is that in my have other features not included in CharView but I could be wrong on this as not having used CharView.
What Character Palette does do is show all Glyphs, Unicode listed in blocks or by hex, gives a visual list of all fonts containing the desired symbol, variants and similar items, a verbal descriptor of each item, its code, insert and favorite capability, groupings, collection groupings, unicode groupings magnification and more.
I am starting to get the impression that if I paid for all the shareware and/or commercial equivalents that Panther includes, such as Character Palette, Fax, Labels, Classic Status, utilities, etc. Panther may be a bargain.
Let us not forget that much of this shareware was free or donation-ware when it was first released and only became salable after users, just like you, documented most of the bugs and suggested improvements. That at least makes me feel better about having to buy Panther all over again a year after Jaguar at full price. At least Panther has some real value beyond bug fixes and performance, and sets standards that 3rd party developers need to allow for in their future releases.