Iconic fonts such as FontAwesome can provide icons at arbitrary Unicode codepoints in the "user" section and label them with names. e.g. U+F000 is named "glass" and is an icon for a martini glass. CSS can provide a means of rendering individual named glyphs:

http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/examples/

Such fonts can be useful for menu items, toolbars, buttons etc., to avoid the need to provide separate PNG assets. So it would be nice to have a means of generating QtQuick Items which realize the named glyph, instead of having to first look up the arbitrary Unicode value which was assigned. E.g. this already works

Text {
    font.family: "FontAwesome"
    text: "\uF000"
}

but this would be more intuitive

Text {
    font.family: "FontAwesome"
    text: "\&glass;"
}

or

Glyph {
    font.family: "FontAwesome"
    name: "glass"
}

I think this will need a new QPA function something like

virtual QChar QFontEngine::namedCharacter(const QByteArray& name) const

which can be implemented using FT_Get_Name_Index on freetype, and hopefully equivalent methods on other platforms:

http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-base_interface.html#FT_Get_Name_Index

but I have not verified that it's possible on every platform. However qtbase/src/gui/text/qfontsubset_agl.cpp already contains a hard-coded table for the Adobe-defined glyph names, so we could use that as a fallback to support some standard symbols in non-dingbat fonts.