How can I access a specific glyph in LuaLaTeX/Fontspec?

Question

The OTF version of Minion Pro contains several Dingbats glyphs I would like to access. Some of them are not unicode, so I can not just copy the specific unicode character I want to access into my text editor.
In specific, I am looking for the bold looking Moon on page 3 of this document: http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/1719.pdf

After searching, I could not figure out how to include a specific character from a font to my document. I found out that I can use the command \symbol{glyph number}, but don't see how I should obtain that number.

Thus I ask my question more generally: how can I use a specific glyph from a font using LuaLaTeX?

Answer 1

In my version of Minion Pro I get the two moons with

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}%
\setmainfont{Minion Pro}
\begin{document}
blub \symbol{57529} \symbol{57530}

\end{document}

I found the numbers this way:

1. I opened temp-minionpro-regular.lua (the path is mentioned in the log-file)

2. There I got to the part starting with unicodes={ (somewhere around line 590.000) and then skimmed the glyph names until I hit upon ["orn.001"]=57525, which sounded like the names for the ornaments.

Answer 2

[the following applies to both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX]

In addition to what Urike said -- another, maybe more practical way of finding a specific glyph is using a tool like Windows's Character Map (or whatever the equivalent is in your operation system). If I wanted Minion's bold crescent moon, I'd look for it in the ›private use area‹ first, for that's quite a common place for special stuff.

Now you can either use the unicode number with \symbol, or you can copy that glyph straight to the TeX document in your (unicode-aware) editor:

...which may or may not display it correctly (this is WinEdt 7 using Courier New). But if the glyph is present in your font, the output should be fine nevertheless.

PS:

I can not just copy the specific unicode character I want to access

I'd say that, using this method, there'll be no unicode character that you can't copy :)

related: How do I enter an arbitrary Unicode code point into my document? and Entering Unicode characters in LaTeX

Answer 3

You can display the some of the glyphs in a font using Context document (assuming the font is called whatever.otf):

\definefontsynonym[Dummy][file:whatever.otf][features=default]
\starttext
  \showfont[Dummy]
\stoptext

This displays the offset numbers that you can use in Latex with \symbol, for the first 256 glyphs in the font.

Postcript

The following code iterates over all the characters in a given OTF file. For some reason unclear to me, this generally seems to include a lot of character entities not associated with glyphs.

 %%Define font name and font path here
 \def\fontname{Jerusalem}
 \def\filename{/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/OTF/SyrCOMJerusalem.otf}

 \startluacode

 charset={}

 function fonttablechars (f)
   local cs, r = f.characters, {}
   for c in pairs(cs) do
     r[1+#r]=c
   end
   table.sort(r)
   return r
 end

 function setcharset ()
   charset = fonttablechars(font.fonts[font.current()])
   return charset
 end

 function printcharset ()
   local step=9
   context "\\bTABLE[split=yes] "
   for i=1,#charset,step do
     context "\\bTR "
     for j=0,step-1 do
       local v, cstr = i+j, tostring(charset[i+j])
       if not charset[v] then break end
       context ('\\bTD \\ppno{%s} \\eTD   \\bTD \\glyph{%s} \\eTD ', cstr, cstr)
     end
     context "\\eTR "
   end
   context "\\eTABLE "
 end

 \stopluacode

 \definefontsynonym[\fontname][file:\filename][features=default]
 \def\glyph#1{\getglyph{\fontname}{#1}}
 \def\ppno#1{#1\relax}

 \starttext

 \section{Print font \fontname\ from \filename}

 \setupbodyfont [\fontname]
 \directlua0{setcharset()} 

 \setupbodyfont [mainface]
 \directlua0{printcharset()}

 \stoptext