Private Use Area For A Font's Hidden Glyphs

[angie]

Hello,

I’m trying to wrap my brain around the Private Use Area. Basically, I want users without access to the glyphs panel to still be able to grab swashes, etc for use with their fonts.

Do I just grab the unicode name from a table like this one? http://unicode-table.com/en/#control-character And insert it into the name field?

Thanks!

[angie]

Nevermind. Found this. VERY helpful!

https://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/creating-an-icon-webfont

[Ana]

Hi!

I wanted to try this to set up my stylistic alternates (characters with beginning and ending swashes) so they can be visible in the character map. But, when I try to rename the uniE000 to a.ss01 for example I lose the E000 unicode name.
How should I do this?
Thanks,
Ana

[mekkablue (Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer)]

This is probably a bad idea and I strongly advice against PUA encoding variants of encoded glyphs. Why do you want to do this?

We had a similar discussion recently. Please read this thread:

PUA for OpenType features

In case you’re wondering, Word supports stylistic sets and contextual alternates. Excel and PowerPoint do not support OT Features. Yet. But I still do not recommend the Unicode hack because it breaks searching and replacing, copying and pasting, changing fonts, it only works with one particular font, and will likely break other application functions. Edit: if you want to go ahead with the PUA hack: There is a script in my repo that lets you assign (PUA) unicode values, I think it’s in the Glyp…

[Tosche (Toshi Omagari)]

According to Laura Worthington, many people who buy script fonts are not creative professionals and do not have Creative Cloud. They need non-OpenType solution to input fancy alternates, and they’re more concerned about different kinds of utility and compatibility, 1. inputting them more easily from char map and 2. preserving them across different apps but in the same font. To them, preserving plain text info is of low priority.