No mention of Cairo. :-(
Or Taliesin/Mobile, or Kare Biology! Literally art work.
Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#12Dingbat 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.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#13To 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.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#14It 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…
Dingbat fonts precede unicode, if I'm reading your post correctly.
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#15Do you remember the conspiracy theories like this one: http://gizmodo.com/wingdings-predicted-9-11-a-truthers-tale-... :)
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#16[deleted]
Re: Why the Wingdings font exists (2015)
#17Earlier 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…
Yeah, so that's wrong and the article corrects itself later on. Fonts are scalable because they need to be displayed and printed at any size, not because they'd take up space. Even with limitless space today we do not store fonts as bitmaps for this very reason.