Every document you type will be read by someone - either by someone else or by yourself in a few minutes, days or years. A document you type with Latin letters or any standard unicode letters is likely to be legible by anyone with the right software - today and in the future. But Wingdings is not standard unicode.
Now, let's assume that you want to show the yin-and-yang symbol to a reader.
You know that it is part of the Wingdings font, so you decide to get the symbol there.
So what you can do is to activate the Keyboard Viewer. Then select Wingdings from the menu in the bottom left corner and then select Wingdings as font in Pages and start typing.
However, when you send this Pages document to another computer user, it is very possible that he will not have the Wingdings font, so the character will not display. What is displayed is just "[" because that is the character that Wingdings uses to display the yin-yang symbol.
And the same thing can happen to you. When you change the paragraph style in this document, the symbol will become "[". If you copy the text to another application, it will become "[". If you export it to RTF and then open it in TextEdit, it will become "[". It is basically a very unstable character - just like all other characters in Wingdings, Webdings and Monotype Sorts.
TextEdit does not even allow you to type the character, and that is probably a wise choice. You can insert it from the Character Palette to TextEdit. You find it in the Character Palette with the View PIFonts, Font: Wingdings-Regular. However, what is inserted is the unicode F05B which is in the Private Area. The Private Area means that it can be used by anyone for anything, so depending on the available font, it can appear as completely different characters.
As you do not know which font the reader will have available, you will not know what the document will look like to him. That's why it usually is best to avoid Wingdings fonts altogether.
There are perhaps cases where you need to use them, but try to make sure you have a normal picture as a backup - just in case. You can also use Wingdings to create PDF files, as PDFs usually embed the font.
5 comments:
There is by the way a yin yang symbol in unicode 262F: ☯.
It should be more stable than the wingding implementation.
Are there any animals on wingdings, e.g. sheep, cattle or horses? I would like to put them into some text which I am preparing.
thank you.
MP
so when it gets sent to someone else it will turn back to normal i have the whole wingding chart with me right now
how do i do this for windows 10?
I have no idea. The post above was written eight years ago for a different OS and a different time. I'm not sure if anything in it makes any sense any more.
A generic piece of advice, however: no matter what you write, if it is important, test read it on a platform similar to that of the recipient, and make sure it displays well.
Post a Comment