Hi I am new to font creation and Font Creator. so please bear with me.
I am trying to create characters that don’t have a standard unicode.
I have found that the Private Use Area is where these characters will go.
If this is correct how do I add new values to the private use area?
currently I can only use the two that are present .
Thanks!
If you’re using the Trial Version, which is the Professional version, then you can use Insert Character, Go to Unicode Block, Private use Area, and add any of those characters that you want to use. See the FAQ at the top of the support forum regarding typing these new characters. You could also create a Symbol font like Wingdings, then you can type your special characters with the regular keyboard.
See Unicode versus Symbol for the pros and cons.
thanks Bhikkhu, I’ll give that a try.
I use the Private Use Area a lot. Many of my fonts are available from links in the Gallery forum if you would like to have a look at one or more of them in FontCreator. First download a copy of the font to a folder on your computer and then open the font in FontCreator from there.
Views on Symbol fonts vary. Personally I rarely use them and I think I have only used them for tests to learn how to make them.
You might find it helpful to have a look through the following recent thread.
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/cant-see-new-character-in-indesign/1814/1
The following might be of use early on.
I cannot fully justify the following advice with theory, but I would advise that you use, while you are learning, only those Private Use Area codes that start with E and that you avoid using any which end in 00 or 40 or 80 or C0, just in case of problems. Some of it is theory based, some of it experience with the way that some software packages have previously assumed things about certain Private Use Area codepoints.
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
8 November 2007
Thanks Bhikkhu and William. It works great. Thanks for all the good information!
Hi.
I’m not using the trial version, i’m not using the Professional version.
I would like to use the Private Use Area also. However, when i insert a new glyph after the last glyph, a value is automatically generated for this new empty glyph: 00EC.
How do i change this value to E000 or E005?
Thanks,
Tom
That’s interesting. In the Professional eidtion, no mapping is added if I insert a glyph.
Right-click on the glyph and select properties, or use the shortcut Alter Enter to bring up the glyph properties dialogue. On the mappings tab, enter E000 in the Value field, and click on Add. You can remove the unwanted mappings.
I do not have the Home Edition, yet the following works for me after inserting a glyph directly from the Insert Glyphs… facility. Hopefully it will work in the Home Edition as well.
Right click on the glyph and select Properties… from the cascading menu.
On the Mappings tab, select the “Microsoft Unicode BMP only” platform.
Enter 0xE000 in the value field and click Add and then OK.
It appears that one may instead enter $E000 in the value field and click Add and then OK. I found that by trying it this morning. I have always used the 0x format thus far.
After adding one or more glyphs into the Private Use Area I find it useful to add Postscript names. This I do by using Format Post… then clicking on the Generate Names button at the top of the dialogue panel and then clicking OK. If I have added a mapping of 0xE707 then the postscript name for that glyph becomes uniE707 and that name is displayed in the Glyph Overview window (if one has the Postscript name option selected in the Tools Options… Overview Captions option-choosing area and the Show Caption checkbox checked in the Font Overview area which is just above it, though I think that that may be the default situation anyway).
In fact, I have always used the Insert Glyph facility rather than the Insert Character facility. This is because I usually use the computer in an 800 pixel by 600 pixel display configuration and the Insert Character facility uses a dialogue panel which goes off the screen at that display configuration.
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
3 August 2008
I tried an experiment of starting a new font and then adding a glyph at the end. I then tried Tools Options… Overview and changed the Caption choice to glyph index and then clicked OK.
The caption for the new glyph was display as $00EC.
That value is the glyph index. Using Microsoft Calculator in the View Scientific mode one can convert 00EC hexadecimal to be 236 decimal. However the glyph is the 237th glyph in the font. This is because the first glyph is counted as having a glyph index of zero, so the second glyph is counted as having a glyph index of 1, the third glyph is counted as having a glyph index of 2 and so on so that the 237th glyph is counted as having a glyph index of 236.
After adding the Private Use Area mapping, the glyph index is still the same.
However, deleting one or more of the glyphs from before the newly-added glyph will change the glyph index of the newly-added glyph, yet the Private Use Area mapping is unchanged.
I usually have the Postscript name option selected in the Tools Options… Overview Captions option-choosing area.
Not all fonts include Postscript names. I always include Postscript names in my own fonts. I am not entirely sure of why I do that, I think that it can make a font file larger, but I seem to have the opinion that it can have advantages to include Postscript names in a font though I am not entirely clear on what are those advantages.
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
3 August 2008
William is right, when you create a new Unicode font, the last glyph has glyph index $00EB. So when you add a new glyph at the end, it will automatically become glyph number $00EC. However this has nothing to do with the mappings. In the home edition, you need to manually add mappings as mentioned in the user manual. The same user manual is available online as well:
http://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator/manual/addacharacter.html
Thank you, William and Erwin, for your replies.
I did not realize the value i was inquiring about was simply an index. In that case, i agree with Erwin, it does not matter.
I have looked at how to add a character in the manual several times before. I have also added characters. I have also mapped the characters i created to the Private Use Area, $000E - $F8FF. And these values are NOT simply indices, right?
However, it is my understanding that i must map glyphs created in the Private Use Area to another range such as $0000-$007F (Basic Latin) in order to have the glyphs print when i press a key.
For example, glyph Di with the index of $00EC has been mapped to Private Use Area $00E1. Great, now i have my glyph in its own space in the Private Use Area. But how do i ge this glyph Di to print when pressing the D key on the keyboard? Well it is my misunderstanding that i must now map Di to $0064 (LATIN SMALL LETTER D). Of course, as a result of remapping, Di is not longer in the Private Use Area. Next i install Test Font 1, go to Word, select Test Font 1 and press D. No visible letter appears. This makes no sense.
Obviously i am doing something or somethings wrong.
Please help.
Tom
The Private Use Area can only be used with Unicode fonts, so don’t try it with Symbol fonts.
It might be an idea to change the caption from Glyph Index to Microsoft Mappings. Just right select a glyph in the Glyph Overview window and select Caption. At any time you can choose whatever fits best.
I thought the Private Use Area is to be used when one is creating his own writing system. I thought the Private Use Area is intended for private use.
Your telling me that it is intended for Unicode fonts only.
I want to use the Private Use Area for my own private use, for my own writing system, my own alphabet. You above statement implies that i cannot. You are also assuming that i am trying to use Symbol fonts, when i said nothing about symbols.
Perhaps you have a different understanding of Symbol fonts.
I want to be able to create ligatures and I want to take advantage of kerning. I don’t believe I can do this with Symbol fonts.
I’ll try this, but i don’t understand how it will help me achieve my goal. I suspect also that i am not successfully communicating my goal.
If you’re creating a new alphabet, and need to type in the normal way, then you’re better off to map them to the alpha-numeric characters in the Latin Basic range A-z.
Forget about the Private Use Area until you come to creating ligatures.
Take a look at some other fonts, such as Myriad Pro or some of my fonts, and see how the Private Use Area is used.
The glyph index just tells you the glyph’s position in the font — it tells you nothing about the keyboard code it is mapped to.
Actually, the Private Use Area is from $E000 to $F8FF. The conventional way to express that in discussions about Unicode is as U+E000 to U+F8FF.
Those values are not indices to the glyphs. They are codepoints in the Unicode codepoint map.
Here is an analogy which might help. Suppose that a building company is building a new housing estate. On the plans the building company numbers the houses. The building workers refer to the houses by those numbers. They are just internal numbers used by the builders.
When the houses are to be lived in by people, they need addresses for mail deliveries, deliveries by grocers, and so on. The builders do not allocate those addresses, they are allocated by the Local Authority of the Government. The numbers used by the builders are of no interest to the mailperson delivering mail, the grocer making deliveries, and so on.
The analogy may not be perfect, but I hope that it will give an idea of the fact that the glyph index and the Unicode codepoint are two different things.
For when you press just one key, that might well be correct.
However, some software packages allow entry of Private Use Area characters, as well as regular Unicode characters, by special methods. For example, Microsoft Word has an Insert Symbol facility. Serif PagePlus has a similar facility.
There is a method, sometimes called the Alt method, which is used in Microsoft WordPad, whereby if one holds down the Alt key and one then keys the decimal value of the Unicode codepoint using the digit keys which are at the right of the keyboard and then releases the Alt key, the character will be included in the document. For example, please consider U+E001. Using Microsoft Calculator in View Scientific mode one can calculate that the decimal value is 57345 so using Alt 57345 causes a character to be included in the document. It may well show as a black rectangle in this post as the font may not contain a glyph mapped to the U+E001 codepoint.
However, sometimes it can be useful to produce a non-Unicode font for a special purpose. However, if a codepoint position which Unicode uses for, say, D, is used for something else, then it cannot be used for a glyph for a letter D.
Yet it can be a useful technique if one wishes to use a font for some special purpose and the program will not accept Private Use Area characters.
For example, keying a Private Use Area character directly into Microsoft Paint using the Alt method is not possible, though I have just found out that keying it into WordPad and then copying and pasting the character works in the version of Paint which I am using. So, when I made some experimental fonts some time ago I added the glyphs into both the Private Use Area and some of the places normally used for the English alphabet.
The fonts are linked from the following thread. If opened in FontCreator with Postscript name chosen in the Tools Options… Overview Caption section, this may be helpful in observing how one person used the Private Use Area for his own project.
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/view-augmentation-logos/1811/1
I recently saw an interesting font which might help to illustrate the use of a non-Unicode glyph within an otherwise Unicode font.
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/71705
In that font, the left-side part of a heart shape is encoded where Unicode places a ~ character.
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
4 August 2008
A Symbol font refers to a particular type of font which Microsoft devised. As far as I can tell, the idea is to allow an end user to key ordinary letters of the alphabet and get symbols on the screen, whilst at the same time encoding the font internally using part of the Unicode Private Use Area. I have never found any need to use a Symbol font other than to try making one as a learning experience.
The Private Use Area can be used when someone is producing his or her own writing system. Indeed, it is done.
The following link might be of interest in relation to one such alphabet, an alphabet named Ewellic.
The Private Use Area is indeed intended for private use. Yet one can publish one’s use of the Private Use Area if one chooses to do so.
For example, I have published some of my uses of the Private Use Area.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm
The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative has published its use of the Private Use Area.
http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/mufi/
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
4 August 2008