You use the term “private use area”. What does this mean?
It is an area of the Unicode codespace where anyone may make his or her own codepoint allocations. This has the downside that they are not unique as everyone else can also make his or her own allocations too! Indeed, people can make more than one allocation each for use in different scenarios if they so choose. Used with care it can be very useful.
There is information about the Private Use Area in the following document.
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch15.pdf
It is available from the following web page as Chapter 15.
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/
Here is a transcript of what I wrote some time ago for the following web page at the http://decode.meso.net webspace.
http://decode.meso.net/w3.php?nodeId=70095&page=1&lang=2&zoom=&prop=
The Private Use Area consists of 6400 codepoints located from U+E000 to U+F8FF inclusive. Its formal title is the primary Private Use Area. It is often known simply as the Private Use Area.
The Unicode Standard presently also contains two other Private Use Areas. The other two Private Use Areas are located in planes fifteen and sixteen, where they each occupy all but two codepoints of a whole plane. They are known as Supplementary Private Use Area-A and Supplementary Private Use Area-B respectively.
The following text refers to the Private Use Area which is located in the Basic Multilingual Plane, that is, to the Private Use Area which is located in plane zero, from U+E000 to U+F8FF.
The Unicode Standard states the following.
quote
By convention, the primary Private Use Area is divided into a corporate use subarea for platform writers, starting at U+F8FF and extending downward in values, and an end user subarea, starting at U+E000 and extending upward. By following this convention, the likelihood of collision between private-use characters defined by platform writers with private-use characters defined by end users can be reduced. However, it should be noted that this is only a convention, not a normative specification. In principle, any user can define any interpretation of any private-use character.
end quote
In practice there are other factors not mentioned in the Unicode Standard which someone defining a character in the Private Use Area may choose to consider.
One factor is that the Microsoft Corporation has a particular use of many characters in the range U+F000 to U+F0FF in relation to symbol fonts on the Microsoft platform for PCs. It is perhaps best to avoid using that range for ordinary Private Use Area character definition, though I cannot state any specific reasons for doing so.
Another factor is that there are various published uses of various Private Use Area codepoints by a number of individuals and organizations. These should possibly be considered before deciding to make a new allocation of one’s own. In the basic theory of the Private Use Area there is no need whatsoever to do that, because each person is free to make Private Use Area allocations as he or she chooses. However, suppose that one is defining one or two characters which one would like to become added into an existing font, perhaps a font from an independent fontmaker. A request to add a Private Use Area character into the font in a place which does not clash with an existing Private Use Area codepoint within that font is more likely to be successful than asking the fontmaker to discard a character already in the font. Also, a fontmaker may have tacitly, in his or her own mind, decided to reserve some Private Use Area codepoints in the font for the possible later addition of some characters from an already published Private Use Area allocation. Thus, although each person is free to make his or her own Private Use Area allocations, it can be advantageous to consider the practicalities of making progress with the applying of such an allocation for the desired needs.
My Quest text font has lots of items within the Private Use Area.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
One note though: as you are learning, please note that Quest text was not originally produced using Font Creator 5.0, so certainly it is fun for looking for Private Use Area items, yet it would be best to use some other font if you are looking as to how to produce a font as Quest text was my first published font.
… my understanding is that anything that is not on a standard keyboard (and I count 94 possible characters, if I’m not mistaken) has to be accessed by typing alt and a numbered code. Is this correct?
Not necessarily. If you are using WordPad on a Windows 98 PC, then it is, as far as I know. With Word 97 on a Windows 98 PC there is the Insert | Symbol facility and shortcuts involving one or more of CTRL, ALT and SHIFT together with a keyable character can be set up . It all depends which package is being used.
My other concern is with kerning.
I have never used kerning with Font Creator, I have only used it once, in a test, with the Softy program, so I am unable to help with this part of your question.
William