Private Use Area for ligatures and alternates

Hi All,

My typeface has standard ligatures, stylistic alternates, and swashes. I will be selling the font and I want it to be as commercially viable as possible, and as useable as possible to potential buyers. So I am wondering if I should add Private Use Area codes to those mentioned glyphs?

Two arguments I've seen/received—I value both sides of the argument I received in the past, but because they are different, I'm trying to figure out what may be best:

1. Some have said “no” because those glyphs are connected to existing character unicode values (A.sso1 = A), so coding A.sso1 with a PUA code would cause breaks/incorrect mapping if fonts were switched by the user. And thus they should be left unencoded.
   
   
2. But at the same time, those who have said “yes” did so because users who are working with less sophisticated software (this isn’t an issue for Adobe products nor in some cases newer versions of Word) won’t be able to access these ligatures and alternate glyphs unless I assigned a PUA to them. (I know PopChar is an option, but doesn’t seem to resolve all cases.)

So it seems safer, more commercially viable to indeed give those glyphs PUA codes… but perhaps the more “pure” practice is to leave unencoded.

I would appreciate any thoughts.

Thanks!