[HN Gopher] Why the Wingdings Font Exists (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
Why the Wingdings Font Exists (2015)
Author : davidhariri
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-02-01 20:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| gayprogrammer wrote:
| I was thinking about why Wingdings, a popular phenomenon in Word
| docs, didn't translate into the web, chat, and mobile SMS until
| the iPhone let us add the Japanese emoji keyboard.
|
| The technical difference that I can see is that Wingdings is
| mapped to English letters (I.E. the same code points), whereas
| emoji are mapped to their own code points. So while Wingdings are
| typed using the standard keyboard, emoji (still today) requires a
| dedicated program/menu/keyboard to select them.
|
| Additionally, font is often ignored/lost in transmission, in
| things like email, web text boxes, SMS. So what made emoji just
| work is that it used unique code points, not reusing other
| characters' code points.
| rgaino wrote:
| In 1996 at my first job as a programmer, the company had a system
| where the password field in the login screen was obscured by
| using wingdings as the font. :)
| netsharc wrote:
| But... that's not clever. Someone with a good memory can just
| remember the symbols and test out each letter on the keyboard
| using the font.
|
| "Person, woman, man camera, TV"...
| recursive wrote:
| Yes, I do believe that's the reason the story was related.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I have only used it as a font in the 3D Text screensaver. Set the
| screensaver to display the time, max speed and use one of the
| Wingdings fonts. It confused the hell out of people. :)
| jnwatson wrote:
| As the article mentions, the Macintosh had a similar font years
| before.
|
| I recall a very early Macintosh game even used a custom font for
| its sprites.
| hinkley wrote:
| We rediscovered icon fonts about 15 years ago for web
| applications and I recall conversations that mentioned
| Wingdings.
|
| It's like finding something in the back of a drawer that you
| completely forgot you had and now can't recall why it got lost
| in the first place.
| greggturkington wrote:
| Yep, we rediscovered them, then we rediscovered they were bad
| (on the web)
|
| https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/
| duskwuff wrote:
| Early Macintosh systems had _several_ such fonts, including
| Cairo and Mobile. The icons in those fonts were a lot weirder
| than Wingdings or Dingbats -- where else can you find a font
| which includes glyphs for a fried egg, an ankh, a frog, and a
| dogcow?
| dhosek wrote:
| I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal around 2000+-a year
| or so about Wingdings when there was a moral panic about what
| happened if you typed NYC in the wingdings font (I was editing a
| typography magazine at the time which is how the reporter found
| me). I patiently explained that the arrangement of characters in
| dingbat fonts is generally arbitrary with patterns generally
| dictated by character code more than anything else and that as
| someone who knew Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes, I could vouch
| that they were not, in fact, anti-semites.
| jansan wrote:
| I disagree with the arbitrary arrangement of characters.
|
| If you write NYC in Webdings, you have an eye, a heart and a
| skyline, which I read as "I love New York". Could be a
| coincidence, but very unlikely IMO.
| senkora wrote:
| That is intentional and was a direct reaction to the original
| controversy.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings
|
| > Following the controversy over possible anti-Semitic
| messages in the Wingdings font, Connare intentionally
| rendered the Webdings character sequence "NYC" as an eye, a
| heart, and a city skyline, referring to the I Love New York
| logo.
| jansan wrote:
| Thanks, I always assumed (without checking) that Webdings
| preceeded Wingdings and thought this would have been a
| tasteless easter egg of a font designer. If Wingdings
| existed before Wingdings, all this makes more sense.
| dhosek wrote:
| (There was an article I read, I think in the _Chicago Tribune_
| , around that time which indicated that by having my name
| appear in the newspaper I had slightly increased my probability
| of being kidnapped. My probability, according to their formula,
| was still less than 1% and true to form, I have yet to be
| kidnapped.)
| michaelt wrote:
| PCB CAD software Altium doesn't have a way to import vector
| images for PCBs - but it DOES have the ability to put vector
| TrueType font text on them.
|
| So if you need to put a UL/CE/FCC/ROHS logo on your board? Altium
| recommend you use the special 'mooretronics' font [1] where
| common symbols have been lovingly converted into the glyphs of a
| TrueType font.
|
| [1]
| https://techdocs.altium.com/sites/default/files/resize/wiki_...
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-02 23:01 UTC)