

However, sometimes I need to make, for want of a better term, a bodge font where the special characters are placed where glyphs for letters like a b c and so on should go. I have various projects where I make extensive use of the plane 0 Private Use Area. Please be aware that there are some application programs where one cannot access characters that are in the Private Use Area.
#Windows unicode font glyphs windows
But that is U+E000-U+F8FF so I was curious to know if there's a reason why Font Creator seems to map Windows Symbol Fonts (or mine at least) onto the 256 characters starting at U+F000 (about 2/3 of the way through if my hexadecimal mental arithmetic serves me). So my plan is to define the glyphs I need for Mozart ( ) in the private use area of the BMP, which seems to be what it is for. The upshot is that different programs disagree about what glyphs they consider fundamental, and which should be built up from two or more. (The Unicode Musical Symbols area is intermediate: it has separate G and F clefs with 8's, but not C clefs with 8's, and none with 15's.) OTOH other programs regard a clef with a little 8 or 15 drawn above or below it as separate clef symbols, resulting in 5 versions of essentially the same clef, whereas I just draw the 8 or 15 as separate glyphs. Other programs just have the larger set (analogous to CSX) and select the font at a smaller size when the smaller ones occur.
#Windows unicode font glyphs code
For example I include the three clefs at the two sizes which are needed, using 6 code points in all, like upper and lower case CSXcsx even though the shapes might be identical. Trying to represent music by a sequence of characters alone (as you can do with text) just isn't going to work, and I think this is recognised by just about every music notation program in existence.Īnd different music programs have different sets of symbols which they need. This may be possible with OpenType fonts (something I need to learn about), but a much easier approach is to use line-drawing code to put in straight line elements of varying length, and just write the glyphs from the font where they are needed. To draw music using it would require not just finding symbols from a font of a given size, but selecting symbols at different sizes, stretching some vertically but not horizontally, some horizontally but not vertically, creating mirror images of others, connecting them with ligatures. It is outside the BMP (U+1D100-U+1D1FF) which indicates possibly that it wasn't thought overwhelmingly important, and tends to make it a pain to use by music notation programs. Now there is a Unicode 'musical symbols' area, but it is not well designed for my purposes. Geometric Shapes, Letterlike Symbols, etc. There are many other character sets for symbols besides that one. There are many symbols in the Miscellaneous Symbols character set, and those are the code-points that you should use if your symbols are the same or very similar.

It is far better to create Unicode fonts with symbols in the appropriate character sets and code-points assigned by the Unicode Consortium. Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Yes, Symbol fonts are almost obsolete now.
