Hello, I’m working on a pictogram-font that pt. has 200 glyphs. How do I make sure that the user can reach all of the glyphs via his keyboard (correct encoding) ?? And how can I reorganize the individual glyphs (move them around)?
Thanx!
This isn’t Glyphs-specific … but when we produced the Erler Dingbats font, we decided the best option was to include a custom keyboard layout that you could install to be able to type the characters in the dingbat font.
On the normal keyboard layouts, the number of accessible characters varies greatly between Windows and macOS, and to group the symbols logically on the keyboard is made difficult by the subtle differences between the localized keyboard layouts.
So my advice would be to assign the most applicable Unicodes to your pictograms, or if no Unicode is defined, use Private Use Area codes, then create keyboard layouts using Ukelele (Mac) and the MS Keyboard Layout Creator (Windows).
Thanx Jens, I’ll try …
i did something with the dlig feature in the style of text messager emoji substitution.
in my case most of the icons are encoded by default.
but to access them in this fashion i thought may be intuitive to most users givin dlig has been enabled.
sub colon h o m e colon by houseBuilding;
sub colon l o c k colon by lock;
sub colon w a t c h colon by watch;
so the user would just type :home: and get 
like here too apparently 
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I have tried this, and it seems that you don’t have to put the word ‘colon’ into the dlig-feature. It works fine in InDesign without …
obviously you dont.
thats so it only converts the words when writing it inside of colons.
as it does in chat apps or in forums such as this as a mentioned previously
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I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do this for awhile now, thanks! I thought dlig was the way to do it but I just couldn’t get it right.
Generally, something like this should not be done in the font. It is a job for the layout engine.
You’re technically right but I feel there’s a lot of potential for specific features for custom fonts.