Font layouts

I'm in the process of making a TrueType font which has more characters
than can be accessed from a standard keyboard, and I'm wondering about the most
logical way to proceed.

Each letter has 4 forms: initial, medial, final and separate.  I can put
the first two into the regular character map as unshifted and shifted
versions.  The other two characters I would put into the character codes
from 128-255, and in such a way that they could be accessed using
Ctrl-Alt and Shift-Ctrl-Alt and the same key as before.  This assumes
such a thing is possible; my font-making software assures me that it
is (although I haven't tried it yet); but when I try to access
existing fonts using Ctrl, Alt and Shift, nothing prints.

Another idea I was toying with was making two auxiliary fonts for the
second two forms, and calling them "bold" and "italic" members of the
same font family as the original.  This way, you could select the
different forms just by choosing Bold or Italic in your word processor.

To produce the letter P, for example, you'd have the following options:

Initial: shifted "p" (i.e. "P")

Medial: unshifted "p"

Final: ALT+0###  or  Ctrl-Alt-p or  BOLD

Separate: ALT+0### or Shift-Ctrl-Alt-p or ITALIC

Does this scheme appear reasonable. or is there a better way to approach
this?  Also, I'll be working on an IBM, but I can produce a Mac TTF font,
too.  Does the character mapping have to change for a Mac?

-- Terry

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711