Can I make a font with More glyphs

[suewhitehead]

I would like to make a font with all the usual caps and lowercase letters and usual special characters (~!@#$%^&*()_+{}{|<>? etc) PLUS some picture glyphs.  Is there any way to make more characters available on a keyboard?  Maybe using the function keys or a different key instead of the SHIFT key?  

[Allan Murray]

You can assign any glyph to any unicode character, but it is the job of the program/app (eg wordprocessor etc) or operating system to assign key presses to particular unicode characters, or to allow some other way to access them (eg insert symbol function in MS Word).