Free font editing program on your computer.

[Patrick Warren]

That's a real nice find! The program is called "Private Character
Editor". If anyone has trouble locating the file (XP or 2000):

- go to Start > Run, and type "eudcedit" and the program will load

- the file is in the WINDOWS/system32 directory if you want to create a
shortcut

- or google for eudcedit or "Personal Character Editor"

About Private Character Editor and Unicode Private Use Area:

The whole "private" thing refers to a sequence of character codes
(E000-F8FF - there's a second private use area, but hopefully you don't
have that many characters that are missing) that were left open for
characters missing from the standard or considered unworthy of being
included in the standard (like Klingon). It lets you use
Unicode-standard characters mixed with your own characters, no
standardization involved. It's not considered the long term solution for
missing characters, however. A proposal for characters or a whole
writing system should be submitted to Unicode to really deal with the
issue. And such a proposal might be a good idea for Siouan languages
(I'm thinking of digitzed Dorsey - what a mess!).

Another very useful program, which should help eliminate the need for
all those remapping fonts that everybody keep creating (displaying an
'a' as something else, but the code is still for an a, like with
Wingdings where 'a' appears as the zodiac sign Cancer), is Microsoft
Keyboard Layout Creator (MKLC):

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/outreach/dnloads/msklc.mspx

(You also have to have the .NET framework installed from Microsoft:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx)

It's for creating new keyboard layouts that you can install into XP (it
creates a Microsoft installer program you can then share with anyone),
just like installing any language's existing keyboard (Russian, German,
Greek, etc.). If you have a decent Unicode font, and your character is
in it, put it in a keyboard layout. I have a Dakota keyboard I use,
which is similar to the English International layout. The apostrophe key
is a "dead key". So if you hit apostrophe + another key you get special
Unicode character, for example:

apostrophe + space = apostrophe
apostrophe + a = a with acute accent (á = 00E1)
apostrophe + s = s with acute accent (ś = 015B)
apostrophe + g = g with a dot above (ġ = 0121)
etc.

Not every character I need is there yet (mostly the dots are under when
I want them over, but that's close enough for me most of the time, for
now - the combining dots don't display well enough in my font), so the
Private Character Editor could be useful. But Unicode is getting better
all the time, and it's really a good idea to start getting used to
Unicode and XML. Overall, this keyboard layout approach is awesome
because you're actually storing your data in Unicode, and once the
keyboard layout is created, you don't have to remember a hundred
different character codes and type six keys every time you want a
'special' character. A huge time/frustration saver. And it actually came
from Microsoft! Who knew?!

Let me know if you have questions about how to use MKLC.

Patrick Warren