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PUA stands for “Private Use Areas”. When a font is PUA encoded it means that this font has a set of special characters such as flourishes and swirly lines that you can use as an alternative to the standard ones.
You can access these special characters on Windows or Mac and load them into applications such as Cricut Design Space, Silhouette Studio, and Canvas Workplace. It'll give you new creative opportunities. For shadow box design, it's useful to get natural extended text tails to connect your word with the frame border.
How to know whether a font is PUA encoded or not?
To know if a font is PUA encoded, you can read its description or ask the font’s designer. That’s why I like to buy fonts on Creative Fabrica or Font Bundles (Design Bundles) because they always show this information clearly on the product page.
You can see PUA encoded icon under Add to cart button on Creative Fabrica.
In Font Bundles, it's displayed under preview image or at the bottom of product page.
How to access all PUA encoded characters?
It depends on the program and operating system you're using. The most common methods to retrieve PUA encoded characters are using Character Map on Windows and Font Book on Mac.
You can follow steps below to load special letters to Silhouette Studio or Cricut Design Space.
On Windows
After installing the font:
- Press + S to open the Search box on Windows.
- Find Character Map and click Pin on taskbar for faster access next time.
- Click Character Map icon on taskbar to open it.
- In the “Font” dropdown, select the font you want to use. I’ve used Family font - one of my most favorite typefaces for paper cutting projects.
- Tick the “Advance View” box.
- In the “Group by” dropdown, select “Unicode Subrange”. A new small window will appear. Scroll it down to bottom and click Private Use Characters.
- Now, in the Character Map window, you may see all PUA encoded symbols. If you don’t see anything like the case of Family font, you’ll need to scroll down to the place special letters are put.
- Click on a character to see it a little bit bigger. If you want to use any character, click “Select” and then “Copy”.
Now you can go to your application, use Text Tool to create a textbox. Press Ctrl+V to paste the character, you may see it as a blank square. Don’t worry! Change font of the textbox to the font that you get that special character from and it will show up correctly!
On Mac
After you installed the font:
- Go to your Applications Folder.
- Search for the program called “Font Book” (this is the program that is also used for installing fonts).
- Open Font Book and choose the font that you want to use - I’ve used Sunkisa font. By default, you should see a sample of the regular characters of the font:
- To view all of the available characters in the font (including the PUA characters), you need to switch to the ‘repertoire’ preview. Do this by either clicking ‘view’ and then ‘repertoire’ from the menu bar, or clicking on the button indicated below:
- Now you will be able to see all the characters included in the font that you selected.
- Select the character that you want to use, click “Edit” and “Copy” (or press ⌘+C) to copy it.
- Go to the application where you want to use the character, use Text tool to create a textbox. Press ⌘+V to paste the special character. Remember to choose the same font for the textbox and it’s now visible in the software you are using.
I hope that you found this tutorial useful. Have fun creating beautiful projects with your PUA Encoded fonts.