You must assign Unicode indexes to ALL GLYPHS (of course from PUA, to avoid possible conflicts).

Thanks Henyk... that seems to be the only way.

I remember I read in FL manual that some foundries use the PUA unicode range for special characters, while others don't, for reasons I can't remember now.

Using PUAs in retail fonts is generally a bad practice, so you should avoid it.
http://www.typophile.com/node/16858

FYI, Adobe has abandoned the practice of assigning PUAs on new fonts:
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2006/05/eliminate_priva.html

So do I get this right: a small cap A, for example, should be 'A.small' with no unicode assignment at all?

Yes.

I'll also add that the glyph suffix is arbitrary, i.e. the smallcap A could be named "A.smcp" or "A.sc" or "A.small" or anything else.

A.

Yes, its bad customers use Corel, Freehand or Word.

with no unicode assignment at all?

Well, it depends.
The bad thing about insertig PUA characters is, that you will mess up the text. You cannot change the typeface, without having wrong characters, spell checking won't work and so on.
But if you design a display typeface this is not so much of a problem. And if you know your customers will use CorelDRAW you may rather do the wrong thing ... and make your customers happy.

Ralf

Thanks every one for the comments... it's all clear now.

I knew Corel sucks, but not that much.

Producing Corel friendly versions of the fonts is not nice, and mess a little the production process, but I'll end up doing it for these "special" customers.

thks again

"I knew Corel sucks, but not that much."

And Adobe is sucking more and more each day.

I'm still holding on to Freehand but will have to give in soon. I'm trying to avoid the Adobe CS suite, though I know I'll end up with it.

I do want to consider the alternatives, though. Corel is definitely a contender.

Corel is pathologically correctly interact with system font driver then under Vista you may forget about PUA :))