I don’t understand how to make production names. I was under the impression the name can be written here, but when I open the font in Indesign or Publisher, the name doesn’t show up in the glyphs panel. Perhaps I have the whole concept wrong.
Thanks!
The other way around. The nice name is Blob and the production name is uni…
Okay, thanks. But first, the instructions are unclear. This reads that nice names are only in Glyphs and not in the final font. I think I got it after a dozen readings, but it needs to be rewritten.
<<The nice names we discussed above are only handled inside of Glyphs. In the exported OpenType font file, different glyph names are expected by the apps that are supposed to process and display your font eventually: we call them production names. >>
What I need is for nice names to show up in Indesign or Publisher, which will eventually be used for screen readers. With this experiment I’m not having any luck. I hope that makes sense.
What you see are not glyph names but Unicode information.
Showing glyph names in the UI (why?) requires a change in Publisher and InDesign, and cannot be forced from within the font. You can request such a feature from Adobe but they will probably not do it.
I don’t recommend overwriting the glyph name unless you really know what you’re doing. Glyph naming has become less important but some functionality may depend on them still anyway.
Perhaps you have more luck with PUA glyphs, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Glyph names in the UI Indesign would be useful for PUA glyphs. But I don’t know if any user facing app that shows them anywhere.
<<Showing glyph names in the UI (why?) . . . Perhaps you have more luck with PUA glyphs, but I wouldn’t bet on it.>>
First, the icons will be in PUA. As I mentioned, the names are needed for screen readers, as screen readers will speak whatever the name of the glyph is. If the name of the glyph is “bullet” then a screen reader will say “bullet”.
We are looking for custom names to custom PUA glyphs that will be read per our designation. For instance, if I were to design this 
it would be read as “incorrect answer” because that’s how I named it and how it shows up in Indesign. We don’t want it to be read as “red ex”.
However, if I’m understanding you gentlemen, this is not possible even in PUA. Correct?
Apologies for the confusion. These are deep weeds -smiley face-
I understand what you are trying to do. And puting the “bullet” in the “production” name field will achieve that. So the font is as you like it to be. The problem is that InDesign is not showing the glyph name in the UI. If the screenreader accesses it correctly, you should be good to go.
How would a screen reader have access to glyph name information? My bet would be that it announces the Unicode names of characters. The font has no way of influencing those.
I would be surprised if screen readers accessed glyph name info of the font used on screen. Screen readers are supposed to only work on the character information. I remember one being configurable for Unicode values, especially PUA, but not through manipulating the font. Out of curiosity, which screen reading software is supposed to do that, access font internals?
