When I’m working on Unicode proposals, I often have to put glyphs in the PUA for using inside my proposal document (as the characters are obviously not encoded yet). But it is a pain to open each consecutive glyph’s properties, go to mapping, enter the next PUA value, and close and do this for each (usually more than 50) characters.
Even when designing fonts for entire codepoint blocks, this would come into play as one would like to have a set of empty glyphs pre-assigned to the codepoints to draw each particular glyph in.
Is there a way to auto-map sequential codepoints to sequential glyphs? Something like selecting a set of glyphs and a menu operation which asks for the starting codepoint and automatically map the consecutive codepoints to the select glyphs.
If there is no such method, please move this to the requests forum. I request this feature.
Its a great time-saver. Transform scripts can also be created to insert character and more, e.g. there is one for adding East European characters sets, then completing composites, to add a wide range of accented characters for Latin Extended A etc.
Jamadagni, if you haven’t gotten ahold of Unibook - http://unicode.org/unibook/ - I would suggest it. It will work with your regular code points, making a Unicode chart for your proposal. If you need to insert a large number of characters into the text of your proposal, then PUA points are probably necessary, but I wouldn’t want you to go to all the trouble if you can just insert a couple of images of the characters you need. Send me a private message if you need any help or pointers, as I’ve gone through this before.
To get the code-points as a string of numbers, select the glyphs in the FontCreator overview, and press the Preview shortcut “P”. This will open the preview toolbar with the selected characters.
Copy the characters from the drop list field and paste them into BabelMap. Select the coding that you want — Decimal, Hex, or UCN. Below are the 10 PUA codepoints that I use for OldStyle Figures:
@Bhikkhu, thanks for that tip about Insert Chars – i’m obviously still getting used to FC.
@Van, I know about Unibook but I have never used it because almost always I need to insert characters amidst my descriptive text as well for discussing them. And once you create a table in Word, you can just copy-paste-adjust it. I’ll keep Unibook in mind however.