Webdings and wingdings

Introduction

Wingdings and webdings are Microsoft dingbat fonts.

• “Wingdings are a series of dingbat fonts which render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes.[1] Certain versions of the font's copyright string include an attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint the font.” (Wikipedia)
• Webdings is a TrueType dingbat font developed in 1997 and included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since that time. (Wikipedia)

Web and wingdings don't have unicode compatible Character encoding. However, there are equivalents, but a bit more difficult to find. See the Windings-Unicode table from Alan Wood and Misc Symbols at Wikipedia.

Some copy/paste characters

Sorry, you may not be able to see these since your browsers also must have these fonts.

Tested on April 2012 with:

• Windows 7 and Internet Explorer (OK)
• Windows 7 and Firefox (FAIL)
• Windows 7 and Chrome (OK)

Webdings font

!…" Y b x s Ñ i W X z ~ €–è

Wingdings font

! " J K L N è ç * S A… Q > O ` a [ Y Z U ) ã

Wingdings 2 font

…‚ƒÓ†Ó† L < ( 0

Pictures

Credits: Wikimedia Commons. All pictures are free of copyright.

Wingdings 1

Wingdings 2

Wingdings 3

Webdings (some older version)

Use cases

To use these fonts under Vista (approximately, I got a french system)

• Program Menu -> accessories -> System tools -> character tables
• Then select and copy/paste

Flash

• Use as clipart

3D modeling

• Use as models or model components, i.e. write 3D text with google sketchup
• Create mashups with Duplos for printing using the RapMan printer.