Hello,
I need to make a font set that contains several thousand engineering symbols. I am new to font making but understand a little.
When creating my new font set should I use Unicode or Symbol?
What would be a good character range to use?
I need to get several thousand characters in. This font will not be used by humans, just by another software program in development, so proper keyboard mapping is not critical. We will mostly be copying the characters in from scans and from other font sets that we have already. We basically just want to get all the characters in one font set instead of the 50 or so font sets we now have to manage.
My main questions are the two above.
Thanks in advance for your guidance on this, or any other advice you can offer.
Rick
Unicode.
Symbol only allows space plus 223 other glyphs. You need to get several thousand characters in. So Symbol is not suitable. Also, as “This font will not be used by humans, just by another software program in development, …” there is no reason to use a Symbol font as far as I am aware, even if you had only 223 glyphs or less.
The plane zero Private Use Area, which runs from U+E000 to U+F8FF hexadecimal. It is probably best to start at the low end. I would suggest starting at U+E001 for the first glyph, then using U+E002 for the second glyph and so on. I cannot justify not suggesting starting at U+E000: it is just that there may possibly be historical legacy issues over using U+E000 on some Windows platforms. I could not say that there would be problems, it is just that I would avoid U+E000 myself, just in case.
I use the Unicode Private Use Area a lot. The following thread might perhaps be of interest.
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/a-font-for-some-experiments-in-computing/2197/1
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
21 March 2009
Not a lot to add to what William has said — yes, use Unicode and the Private Use Area.
You might, however, like to map some at least to Alpha Numeric characters for easier keyboard input, or perhaps you need some text characters that match the symbols? Something to consider.
Scan at the right resolution to get good import quality — aim for about 500 x 500 pixels.Size Does Matter
Cut and paste from an image editor like IrfanView can speed up input if you need to import a whole page of symbols, just scan the entire page. Scanning an Entire Alphabet
Thanks to all, this helps a lot.
There is some information about the Private Use Area in chapter 16 of The Unicode Standard, starting at page 18 of the pdf document.
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch16.pdf
That chapter and other chapters are available from the following web page.
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/
William Overington
24 March 2009