Font Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie at this stuff and I lack a LOT in understanding about how this program works. Before I invest in this program I need some information. I am trying to use the characters that are in a section called "Private Use Area". I am wondering, if I buy this program will I have the ability to use the characters that are in the "Private Use Area"? You see, there is a font that I have on my computer that I love a lot but I need access to ALL the characters within the font because my favorite font is a brush script font. And it has (I hope I'm saying this correctly) glyphs that are very useful in designing things.

Thanks for your input in advance.

Mark

You don't actually need to buy MainType to try it out. The free version is limited to non-commercial use, and only supports 2,500 fonts, but otherwise it does many things that the paid-for version does.
If your word-processor or other application does not support the characters in the Private Use Area, you could use it to copy the glyphs and paste them into the application, but you could do that equally well with Windows Character map.

The primary purpose of MainType is to view, organise, and install/uninstall fonts.

When I try to paste from the Windows 10 Character Map, the character is there (tiny) but there is this white background behind it. Plus when I go to paste it gives me a choice of "Rich Text Format" or "HTML Placeholder" and I have no idea what these mean.

What application are you pasting the glyphs into?

If I paste Private Use Area glyphs from MainType to this forum I get the .notdef rectangle glyphs as the browser's font does not support these glyphs:  - maybe that's what you're seeing.

If you don't have an application that supports OpenType features, try LibreOffice. It's not the easiest to use, but at least it is free, and fairly powerful. It also has a built-in character map for inserting special glyphs.

If you don't mind spending £20 or $30, try PagePlus X9. Although it will be the last version produced, it's OpenType support is excellent, and it is a fully featured Desktop Publish program with enough features for simple vector and bitmap graphics to satisfy most users.