[OpenFontLibrary] Tooth notation fonts

[Mark Preston]

Hi all,
I'm interested in creating some free font characters that may be useful
for the field of dentistry. In particular to enable the writing and
encoding of Palmer tooth notations.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Notation_Method

There are already some similar unicode characters available that might
be useful for me - see
http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/miscellaneous_technical
For instance:
U+23C0 DENTISTRY SYMBOL LIGHT VERTICAL WITH CIRCLE
U+23BE DENTISTRY SYMBOL LIGHT VERTICAL AND TOP RIGHT

A few years ago with the help of the GIMP I created some bitmap
characters, but as I delved deeper it seemed that creating fonts was
actually very difficult and avoiding copyright infringements would make
distribution of the characters fraught with problems, so I left things
alone for a while. Even the characters I created may have infringed
somebodies copyright. I don't know.

For an overview of the characters I created see
http://www.markpreston.co.uk/fonts/palmer.png

These were based on the article
"The Palmer notation system and its use with personal computer
applications" by J W Ferguson.
This article gave some ideas on implementing the generation of Palmer
type characters - mostly for Windows based machines and Microsoft
applications
Ref.
http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v198/n9/full/4812303a.html
Eg.
"Those using the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, however, can
create their own Palmer notation characters with a little-known function
called Private Character Editor (PCE) which is already included with the
software. A description of the procedure is given in the appendix.
However, whereas a freestanding font generated with proprietary software
can be distributed and installed on any personal computer, PCE
characters cannot be exported. This is of no consequence if the user
simply wishes to produce hard-copy output, but has implications for the
electronic transmission of documents"

There have been some ttf type dental fonts produced in the past that
have been distributed by other people, and for the purpose of this email
request I have put them as a zipped file available for download at
http://www.markpreston.co.uk/fonts/dentalfonts.zip
The Palmer type characters are in the den6f___.ttf file.
I think there may be some limitations on the distribution and
modification of these files, but there may not be. I don't know.

Anyway, I would be grateful to have some advice from the cognoscenti on
how to best proceed with the aim of getting some free/libre font
characters to use ideally under Linux in programs such as TeXmacs,
OpenOffice, Icedove and Iceweasel. Also, the characters should ideally
enable reasonable printing out of documents. If they work on other
programs and operating systems then so much the better.
I have set up Fontforge to create the characters/fonts, and I thought
that maybe creating some BDF fonts would be a good starting point. In
terms of Unicode are the characters best placed in the Private Use Area?
Maybe I don't actually need to create any characters I just need to
learn how to amalgamate some of the existing Unicode characters and
fonts to produce the symbols I want.
Any advice would be gratefully received.

Thank you,
-- 
Regards,
Mark Preston