Dear OCTO, I am accustomed with this discussion.
I'd like to share with you and our colleagues my experience, reg. your font with additional characters.
For my own needs I had remapped the main (custom) font, exchanging it from "music" to "text" font.
Indeed, there is a known bug, that Finale (for Mac only) can not access slots between 128-159.
Instead of showing all glyphs of Windows 1250 ANSI (which is very similar to the "Default encoding— Western/Roman", except only 3 slots – "minus", "Zcaron" and "zcaron") Mac version displays Unicode 0080-009F.
These slots are not supposed to contain glyphs, but controls (and therefore the category they belong to is called "Controls"). In fact "Maestro" puts on these places several important elements, that could not be neglected, although some of them can be effortlessly substituted.
As our colleague Jan from notat.io suggests, there are good practical solutions.
For myself I've chosen the most appropriate for Finale, which may be is not the best for Dorico or even Sibelius.
Namely: all unaccessible glyphs have to be removed to another code page. In my case to "Type 1 World ISO 5889-5 Cyrillic".
In a beginning I was thinking to "throw" them into "Extended Latin1 or 2", but using (modified for Finale) US keyboard layout, that wouldn't lead to no good or to really huge number of diacritics, applying "death keys" with the "Opt. key" an so on.
The common Cyrillic script (used in Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian and many other languages) contains ca 32*2 simple characters (Caps and small) and is easily recognisable for millions of people (inc. those, that can encipher the characters without even understanding or speaking the aforementioned languages). Many characters are either the same as Latin or easily found on Phonetic Layouts (BG, RU etc.).
In addition – there are no slots in ISO 5889 encoding, where even single glyph overlaps an existing symbol from ANSI (Western Latin).
In order to make the access (to these extended slots) easier, I programmed ca 70 ligatures and over 360 kernings for the most important symbols or for those of them, that time to time have to be input as "Text expressions" (without switching to any external keyboard layout).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/64ccfv72828jc ... s.pdf?dl=0
Avoiding SMuFL is another story and I will explain "Why", specially here, in Finale forum.
E000-FF00 is enormously large space for storing symbols etc. But there is no easy way to access thousands of glyphs by typing on the computer keyboard, except using custom keyboard layout or typing unicodes, which is a pain.
Alternatively, the font can be supplied with ligatures, but this is again a step back to the times of DOS.
Apart form that, scrolling through thousand of slots, loaded with almost useless (from my point of view) symbols, leads to missing focus.
________
Back to "ANSI+ISO 5889" version of the font.
I attempted many tests, being merciless to the file. As a result - in the already existing Finale score, the above mentioned symbols from 128-159 (such as double sharp, double flat, tenuto+accents etc.) had to be substituted. I was surprised that this procedure did not take too much time. I had to check the Articulations, Expressions and Smart shapes.
As for the installation: it's simple and does not require adding font name in "MacSymbolFont.txt"
Last words of advise:
if you are going to build a font, because you need (frequently or permanently) to change the note heads, since in contemporary compositions this is a "must"
, I would suggest placing the important symbol(s) (i.e. quarter, half and whole note heads) on a convenient (accessible by typing single letter or with shift, eventually opt. key) slot, followed immediately by all it's stylistic alternations (for short "salt").
Thus you can select everything you need almost in an instant, instead of scrolling up and down, lurking for the right music symbol.
At last – OCTO, when you create your extended font, do not underestimate the metrics and additional features (kernings, ligatures etc.) – they always bring consistency, distinction to the layout and personal satisfaction during the engraving in Finale.
best,
Wess