I know that the encoding of stylistic glyph variants with unicode PUA code points is frowned upon, and all of our commercial OT fonts contain no PUA encoding. But many of our customers are sign makers, and sign making software is generally not OT savvy. The only way for these clients to access stylistic glyphs, is via Windows Character Map, and that requires a glyph to have a unicode codepoint. Is there any "best practice" as to using PUA that will allow this?
James
I think best practice is to stick to a convention within your foundry, i.e. you make yourself a system, and put e.g. swash letters always into the same range, etc.
PUA is exactly that: private use area, so there is no "industry standard". But it's a good idea to use an internal (private) "standard".
I start at E100, which seems to avoid many of the major player's "reserved" PUA codepoints.
There are some organized conventions for use of the PUA, but they are, by definition of the PUA, unofficial. But if you are working in the relevant genre, such as constructed/artificial scripts or medieval research it might be helpful to follow those guidelines. This probably isn't much of an issue for the sign making market, but there it is.
Exactly.
E.g. If I'm creating a font for the scholarly/philologist with publications of oldmanuscripts in mind, I'd use MUFI recommendations.
Then again, you'd do that only on commission, so you'd know what to use.
And as Jason pointed it out, this one is of no concern to your clients.
Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL