Re: Unicode range for lilypond fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I found this comment in the font generation scripts:
> 
> # crashes fontforge, use PUA for now -- jcn
> # SetUnicodeValue(i + 0xF0000, 0);
> SetUnicodeValue(i + 0xE000, 0);
> 
> It seems that this comment is obsolete: fontforge (at least, my
> version) no longer crashes if I use 0xF0000.  Is one range preferable
> to the other?

Given that the U+E000 - U+F8FF Private Use Area (PUA) is quite
crowded, this is, many people use it for other purposes, I personally
favour the larger U+F0000 - U+10FFFF PUA range.  You might have look
at

  http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/

to avoid a range which is used by the ConScript Unicode Registry.

Note, however, that this is pure convention.  Nobody can enforce an
encoding of the PUA at all.  A potential drawback is that older
programs won't understand code points outside of the Basic
Multilingual Plane (BMP, U+0000 - U+FFFF), but I don't think we are
affected by that because lilypond accesses the fonts by glyph names
only.


    Werner