You can do non-BMP Unicodes in FontLab. You just have to give the glyphs names in the format "u10412" etc. You can't see the non-BMP Unicode correctly in FontLab, but it should work in the exported font.

Note that the title of your post is a little off; UTF-16 is simply one of the ways of representing Unicode (and requires two code points to represent a non-BMP code). From a font perspective, you don't use two code points to represent a non-BMP Unicode, but instead use a 32-bit cmap (UTF-32). The font itself will actually have both a 16-bit cmap and a 32-bit cmap.

Cheers,

T

Thomas: Thanks for the pointers. I didn't know that about unicode fonts. I guess I need to read up on the unicode standard. I've never really worried about it up to this point. I tried your fontlab tip, and it didn't work. The characters come out mapped differently. Any other ideas?

Nope. That was my understanding of how to do it. Maybe I got some key detail wrong. You could try browsing the FontLab user forum on MSN. I know this has been discussed there.

Regards,

T

If you have a Windows machine, you can run the fonts through Microsoft's free VOLT tool. This is a program for adding OpenType Layout features to a font, but it also rewrites cmap tables, so you can use it to map glyphs to non-BMP characters. However, you have to use surrogate pair values, not 32-bit scalar values, so this convertor will be useful.