What is 'private use area'

Get help with FontCreator here. Please do not post feature requests or bug reports here.
Post Reply
patrickm
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2009 6:51 pm

What is 'private use area'

Post by patrickm »

Using FC14. I have an old symbol font of astrology symbols. In the help section named "Unicode versus Symbol" it says "Important: Symbol fonts are legacy; we recommend designing a Unicode font instead. If there are code-points assigned for your characters, then use them otherwise use the private use area." The phrase "private use area" is no where else in the help file. Can you explain what the private use area is and how I access the controls for this. I am converting my symbol font to Unicode and want to do it correctly. Thanks.
Bhikkhu Pesala
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 9869
Joined: Tue Oct 29, 2002 5:28 am
Location: Seven Kings, London UK
Contact:

Re: What is 'private use area'

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Open the glyph overview side panel on the left (Shortcut = Ctrl+L)

You will see a list of Unicode character sets. There are several code-points reserved for Astrological symbols.
Miscellaneous Symbols.png
Miscellaneous Symbols.png (73.82 KiB) Viewed 1609 times
The Private Use Area code-points are not assigned by the Unicode Consortium to any characters, so any astrological symbols that are not found in the Miscellaneous Symbols character set can be assigned code-points in this area.

I use the PUA for Small Capitals and additional ligatures in my fonts.

If the characters do not exist yet, you can insert them from the Insert characters dialog.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
Post Reply