To 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.
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.
Because 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....
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.