After having upgraded my copy of Fontographer, I decided to try something I've been thinking about for a couple of years: making a "clean" version of some of my period fonts.

It's actually more difficult than creating replicas of period typefaces, because if the outlines aren't exactly right, they look bad. With the dirty, pitted lines of a replica, flaws actually add to the look rather than detracting from it.

Since the latest version handles Unicode fonts, as well as (finally!) exporting native Macintosh files, I also plan to completely re-encode the original period fonts in order to finally address the issues which have plagued me since their inception.

They were originally created under Windows 3.1, which only permitted 240 characters per font. Since they included various obsolete characters and ligatures, I had to delete some of the usual characters from the ISO Latin-1 set, and because the blackletter font possessed some different characters than the roman/italic set, I had to use different encodings.

By using Unicode, I can put back the missing Latin-1 characters and encode all the fonts identically. It'll require rewriting the companion software (and perhaps writing a translator application from the old encoding to the new), but it's a small price to pay for consistency (and Mac compatibility).

So... can any Mac user out there tell me how you access Unicode characters from the keyboard? I've got a key map which shows the characters available with the Option key, but how do you get to other characters?