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What software can I use to create an original (non-Latinized) alphabet with? I have found fontlab 5, but I cannot find documentation that discusses how you create an original alphabet. They assume everyone wants to create new fonts for English. I have created a scientific alphabet that is not used by any culture in the world and I want to know what software I can use to create the characters.

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Ultimately, you're stuck with creating fonts overtop existing languages because your alphabet, in addition to its glyphs (the visual representations of characters), requires an encoding (the underlying mapping between bytes and glyphs). To create a new alphabet would entail designing and proliferating a new character encoding.

Unicode provides (currently) 3 private use areas that are reserved for private use, which are guaranteed to not be allocated officially by the Unicode Consortium. You can create a font that uses those Unicode Scalars

Alexander
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  • I'm sure there's plenty of room still in Unicode :) Just got to get their attention somehow. – Michael Dorgan Nov 29 '16 at 00:19
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    @MichaelDorgan I just edited my answer just as you said that hah. Check it out – Alexander Nov 29 '16 at 00:20
  • Hooray unicode. Seems you should be able to map the font correctly to those areas somehow. Something to look into at least. – Michael Dorgan Nov 29 '16 at 00:25
  • @MichaelDorgan Yep! though of course, it comes with the caveat that it'll only ever work correctly for implementations designed in compliance with the new alphabet. Just a heads up for OP. – Alexander Nov 29 '16 at 00:28
  • On a side note, I'm curious what I got down voted for. – Alexander Nov 29 '16 at 00:28
  • Dunno - overzelous people trying to kill wide questions I guess. – Michael Dorgan Nov 29 '16 at 00:38
  • I can see why this question could get closed for recommending tools or whatever, but there's a valid component to this question besides that – Alexander Nov 29 '16 at 00:39
  • Does anyone know what software I can buy to create original alphabetic characters? I don't need to type them just yet, I only want to design them. –  Nov 29 '16 at 00:54
  • Nope, and that's off topic for stack overflow. Try http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com – Alexander Nov 29 '16 at 01:41