
Why the Wingdings font exists (2015) - tomkwok
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/25/9200801/wingdings-font-history
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sambeau
To understand Wingdings you first need to understand Letraset dry transfers
and to fully understand Letraset you first need to understand 'Decals'.

Letraset was the only way to get professional typography in the 1970s (and
most of the 1980s) without resorting to a professional typesetter. The whole
technical design and architectural design world was consumed by Letraset and
any home or office that, say, owned a set of Rotring pens and a few french
curves would also have sheets of Letraset and a Letraset catalogue (or three).

As well as sheets of all moder typefaces, Letraset had sheets of icons and
useful decals including all the things in the Dingbats font (plus much more).
You could buy sheets of pointing hands, trees, traffic, washing label icons,
stars, ornaments, hatching, ... Google images has a lot of examples of these
kinds of Letraset.

As a child of the 1970s I was obsessed with Letraset. My friends and I would
pour over the catalogues like we would a Lego catalogue or a Littlewoods
(postal shopping catalogue). Letraset was expensive.

As a young adult I was simultaneously wowed by the freedom (and cheap price)
of Dingbat fonts and clipart disks while being appalled at the low quality of
the artwork. I wondered why Letraset hadn't immediately jumped into the
computerised world, like, say Pantone managed to. Did Letraset enforce
copyrights to keep clip art so poor?

I suspect there is a much more interesting story here somewhere.

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martin_henk
It is a clipart font! This article is a bit like these linkbait things, where
young people are presented with a audio cassette and a pencil

~~~
galago
They do hint at, but don't examine from a technical perspective some of the
strangeness associated with dingbats. For example, 'n' in an Office
application was/is mapped to a picture of a skull, even though a skull has a
true Unicode value. Bullets and other symbols aren't just 'clipart', they're
used to structure documents, and a lot of problems in document
creation/management--especially cross platform--are related to how these
situations are handled. Modern emoji where :) maps to a Unicode value of a
smiley face add another layer. Perhaps this wasn't the best article, but I
think knowing a bit about the pre-computer history, and the early computer
history is important to understanding some of the difficult problems that
emerge in application development.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Dingbat fonts precede unicode, if I'm reading your post correctly.

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xlayn
Because we needed to share ideas over a medium where images depictions coded
in BMP, JPG or GIF were probably slow and by setting a set of "most probable
images" and mapping them to a letter we can always perform the transmission
using old loved ASCII to concepts... precached on your HDD in every windows
install....

Did the penguin had it?

~~~
jahewson
That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article? Physical
printing-press typefaces have always contained all sorts of symbols, or
"dingbats". So it's completely natural to add these to a font. Especially as
you want your symbols to be represented just like any other glyph: using
vectors, not bitmaps, and with the ability to use hinting.

Modern fonts now include their own dingbats, as the limit of 256 characters
has long since been lifted. So there's no need for a separate font like
windings.

~~~
xlayn
>That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article?

From the Article:

>Today it's easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be
a lot harder. There were few ways to get images, files were way too large for
puny hard drives, and they were of poor quality. Even worse, it was tough to
get pictures to play nicely with text. Fonts like Wingdings provided a
workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that didn't clog up
their hard drives.

~~~
Laforet
Every week I receive emails with random letter J's inserted in the text. Took
me a while to realise that Outlook is auto-converting them to the Wingdings
smiley which corresponds to J in other fonts. The problem is that none of the
email clients I use renders it correctly.

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Aleman360
Still a thing, even in Windows 10. See the "Segoe MDL2 Assets" font.

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derFunk
Do you remember the conspiracy theories like this one:
[http://gizmodo.com/wingdings-predicted-9-11-a-truthers-
tale-...](http://gizmodo.com/wingdings-predicted-9-11-a-truthers-
tale-1679759324) :)

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empressplay
Dingbat is an ancient slang term for a crazy person (someone with "bats in
their belfry, striking the bell")

In the context of type, ornamentations were thus called dingbats because they
were essentially pointless, of no substance.

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SeanLuke
No mention of Cairo. :-(

~~~
jd3
Or Taliesin/Mobile, or Kare Biology! Literally art work.

