How can I access un-encoded glyphs from a font in Scribus?

Question

When I purchase commercial fonts or I obtain quality free fonts, I find many glpyhs listed in the PDF-documentation, typically at the end, listed as un-encoded glyphs aka un-mapped.

While any "normal" glyphs are listed with their code points, for example U+00C0, these unencoded ones carry some less structured references. I found for example:

• plus.numr
• equal.numr

If you have fonts without documentation and if you use Fontmatrix to look into, using the "Glypen" tab with the "Un-mapped Glyphs" block selected, you can find many amazing goodies. (Look at Comic Sans if you want an example.)

• I+967

Now, how can I please access those glyphs for use in Scribus (and why not in other OpenSource tools like Inkscape)? If there is no direct way, I am happy to download some extra tool and do some copy and paste.

Sadly I am unable to get Adobe InDesign at the moment for several reasons, so answers like "just get expensive tools" might be helpful to other users, but not to me. Thank you.

Answer 1

This is my best workaround after plenty of searching:

Open the font in FontForge, scroll aaaaaall the way down to the end of the glyphs list; the un-encoded glyphs come after all the Unicode positions.

Open a glyph you want to use. Then in the glyph-editing window use the file > export as > and use .eps as file format.

Now you need to get this item into your clipboard for copy and paste. I do it inside Scribus like this:

Scribus file > Import Vector and click somewhere next to your text frame. Now resize the glyph so that it corresponds to the text in a text-frame you want to use. Select the vector and copy.

Now double-click inside your text-frame and place your cursor where you need that glyph (say an ornament) and do paste. Scribus has now integrated this vector-information into this text as a so called "inline graphic". This does only work in a text-frame, not in the story editor.

Still hoping for a more direct approach without the need for a separate vector file. With this solution I just get a graphic sitting in my text and it does not respond to any text-editing, like resizing. At least I can select it and move it with the Advanced Settings in the Text Properties window.