Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#2Because 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?
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#3Still a thing, even in Windows 10. See the "Segoe MDL2 Assets" font.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#4[deleted]
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#5It 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
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#6Because 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?
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.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#7Because 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?
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 ch…
>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.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#8No mention of Cairo. :-(
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#9It 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
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.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ch…
>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-q…
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.