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I want to create a new character symbol. I don't want to create an entire font, or change any keyboard settings. I just wanna draw a single character that I can then copy, and paste it in a text.

I'm looking for a software that could replace gracefully the Private Character Editor from windows.

I read this question, and it doesn't help.

I also tried a couple of alternatives to Private Character Editor, but I didn't find what I'd wanted.

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You can not really just create a single character symbol.

Why not?

Each character in every digital text is actually just a one or more bytes wide number.

To decide what this number represents is the job of the character encoding of the text. There are e.g. good old ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 and many more. For example the number 65 represents A in ASCII and most other codecs, but special punctuation characters or non-latin symbols are normally encoded differently.

Now having the text data (the numbers) and knowing its encoding, we know what letters and symbols each character is meant to represent. However, we don't know yet how that character looks. Therefore we need a font. Fonts define the appearance of every supported character, either using bitmaps or vector graphics. If the font you configured to display a piece of text does not support a character, you'll likely just see a rectangle or some other replacement, like here.

As a conclusion, to have custom character symbols, you need to at least create or modify a custom font and change the appearance of any character to what you need.

But how does that Windows Private Character Editor do it then?

The PCE (Private Character Editor) is a system component of Windows and seems to deeply integrate with Windows' font cache. I don't know how it internally works, but it must somehow add your private characters to all (selected) fonts installed on your system on the fly while using them.

I don't know of any such mechanisms available on Ubuntu.

Why shouldn't I use them anyway?

The problem with using custom characters or fonts is that unless you distribute your font with all those documents that use it (exception: some formats like PDF can also include all used fonts directly into the document), everybody else can not view your custom characters correctly, as they will view it with a different (fallback) font.

And what should I do instead?

Maybe the symbol you need or one that is similar enough does already exist in some generally available fonts?

Otherwise, why not simply making a little image of the symbol you need and inserting that image in your documents wherever necessary? This way it will surely be portable to other systems as well.

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  • Awesome answer, it was very instructive. Thanks a lot! The symbol I want is a personalized logo, so it most likely doesn't exist in other generally available fonts. I could add an image indeed, but that would be quite cumbersome for the task I need the custom symbol for. I'm coding a signature bar for a graph using Python's matplotlib, and I want to avoid overcrowding the code. Adding a text snippet would be far more elegant. Anyway, your comment was very helpful. I'm thinking now whether matplotlib will be able to decode the symbol I make (provided I made one). What do think? Aug 23, 2017 at 14:23
  • I don't know how matplotlib works, so I can't answer you that. It would also depend on how you approach making your symbol.
    – Byte Commander
    Aug 23, 2017 at 14:27

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