I am new to using LaTeX, I haven't used it so far due to font issues - I adopted Unicode when it first came out and I have never like Knuth's original fonts (great work that he did, his font perceptions and mine are not always the same). My problem is that I have a font with around 2,000 characters in the private use area and in the ASCII region. XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX gives me hope that I can finally use LaTeX now.
I do not want to replace the main fonts, I simply want to use characters out of my private font, embedding them in my document, preferably a .pdf. I can do this in Word and in HTML. When doing so, I may use mathematical expressions containing those symbols, but they would just be treated as a block. Using the default fonts for normal mathematical expressions (or Cambria Math) is fine. So, how do I use a private unicode font in that manner? Currently it is .ttf, but I could probably build the font as .ps, although all of the font outlines are ttf.
Just embedding the unicode value won't work because that doesn't include the fontname or font file (the font is not normally installed in the OS, I use the font file directly). That would just take the symbol from the current font which is not what I want to do. I also don't want to break the font into 10 or more separate fonts. There are no variants of the font, it contains mathematical letters of various natures, but the classification does not match the expected classification. Those classifications are sans-serif, sans-serif bold, sans-serif bold slanted, slab-serif, slab-serif slanted, serif, serif italic, serif bold italic, script, hollow, Greek. All of these contain the lower and upper case letters and digits (except for Greek which doesn't have digits). They are all compatible in terms of design and with respect to the non-letter symbols. There is some symbol overlap with defined Unicode positions, but most symbols are not available in Unicode.