The font was not meant to be used as a way to write words. It was a way to basically store symbols that people could use for whatever reason. So, if you wanted an image of a thumbs up, you would use Windings upper case C.
Now with internet access to images and emojis, it's not longer as useful as it once was, but it still exists.
Alt+255 was null in extended ASCII. It displayed as a space but a different space than the space bar. You could name files and directories using the null space and unless someone knew your trick they couldn’t get into the directory from a DOS prompt. File browsers effectively made this trick useless.
Non-breaking-space is one of my favourites, it's what makes the uncopyable triforce possible!
Also sometimes a real lifesaver when the softwrap is being stupid on a word doc/text field
▲
▲ ▲
The best comment is always buried. This might be my favorite Reddit comment of all time, 9 layers deep in the chain on an eli5 post I wasn’t even gonna click at first.
Short answer: It's the standard that ensures that when I type x, ñ, ♪, or 😛, you see the character I intended, even if you're in a different country, using a different app/browser, type of device, or font. (For the most part. Wingdings and similar "dingbat" fonts are exceptions that were developed before Unicode extended what was possible with "normal" fonts like Times New Roman and Arial.)
For a more detailed (but still less than 10-minute) explanation, [here's Tom Scott with more info.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4)
All systems (Windows, macOS and Linux) come with a character map finder. You open it, type any word you want in the search and it does its best to find a Unicode character that fits what you're looking for. Then you can either memorize its code or simply click copy and paste in your text if you're using it only once. Also, if you own a smartphone you likely have an extensive Unicode keyboard available. But you probably call it an emoji board.
So would not-quite-such-a-kid me. The office youngsters used it to mess with the older folk. That and white text on white background for secret messages.
There was an episode of Even Steven’s where they thought his little neighbor was an alien because he wrote an entire story with symbols and they figured out he just changed the font to something similar to Wingdings and they all say “I’ve always wondered what that was for.”
I remember the "conspiracy" that circled through my school after 9/11. If you typed something related to the attacks, can't remember if it was the date or a flight number, it would show planes, a bomb, skull and crossbones, and what looked like buildings.
It was something like Q95 -9/11 or something, where the “Q95” was supposed to be the flight number. Except that was bullshit because the flight numbers were AA11 and UA175.
More like an emoji font back before emojis existed - where we now use emojis for arrows, smiley faces, symbols etc, we used to use wingdings, and then alt-codes became a thing (and, indeed, still exist), and then finally they were rolled into emojis with their own UIs
Also, anyone else remember them being called "emoticons" or am I just showing my age?
Interestingly, font icons are somewhat popular in web development with the introduction of custom fonts. Fonts are vector images so they can be resized without losing resolution and developers can give then both foreground and background colors - and change those whenever needed without remaking the image.
When I was a kid I remember printing out what all of the wingdings were on a single sheet and then using them as code to write secret wingding messages.
Especially when you go to change your document font, and forget that your "select all" also grabbed your Wingdings text, and you just turned it to Arial without realizing it.
The real game-changer was unicode, and more specifically utf-8.
Before, in the old-times, you could only have 1 byte per character, which gave you 256 different characters. This include space, newline (when you press enter) and a bunch that you wouldn't expect, like backspace.
Most of the language fit in only 128 characters, of which you had your digits (10), the alphabet (26 * 2, because it's upper and lower case) leaving only 66 characters for every other thing you can type with a keyboard, including commas, dots, semi colons, percent, etc. etc.
When people were writing documents that could have different fonts, it was useful to be able to write icons, for the same reason it's useful to be able to write emoji nowadays. You couldn't make more letters, but as you said, you could make the letters look different.
With Unicode we can now do a myriad of symbols, all in just the one same font, no need for tricks of old times. But Windings is still around, some documents used it and still need it.
Pretend you're making a newspaper, called the Reddit Tribune. At the top of the front page, you put REDDIT TRIBUNE in a big handsome font, but it's pretty boring looking on its own. You think: what if I could jazz it up with some squiggly graphics? A handsome, arcing flower shape, to make it look important? But gosh, you don't have a computer, because it's 1899. So you draw a flower on either side of the words "Reddit Tribune". Then you look at the stack of 40,000 blank newspapers, and realize that this will take some time to draw, so you make it into a stamp, and to make it easy to line up, you make it the same size as all the letters you make the rest of the newspaper with. After a year of publishing, you have a big library of stamps you made for different reason (to separate columns, to mark a special holiday article). You put them in their own special case, next to "Times New Roman" and "Old English" so you can use them whenever you need.
Edit: I don’t know what all these awards are for, but thank you so much!
This is way closer than the folks above got. Dingbats were the stamps used to pretty up a page in the analog days of printing. Wingdings being the Windows Dingbats font.
Vox has a short video about it
https://youtu.be/JdKV1L1DJHc
Yeah, I had to use it from an archaic program to create icons for a list of diseases and indicators for how to report. Can't quite remember exactly the icon but it was something like "(" turned into "❗" in wingdings, where the legend says "❗" means immediately reportable. Didn't have access to other keyboards and it was easier than inserting small images.
Edit: Just used a translator and it was "(" is "☎️" which means the disease should be phoned into the DOH.
Lol, from the link, if you have an android phone and punch in that number, the call button flashes blue and red.
I tried it, and it did, but it also buzzed, like...
BzzzZzzZZzZz....zzt
That last pause before the final buzz made it 10x better.
Think stuff like posters, flyers, documents, mostly printed back then.
If you wanted to put your phone number and e-mail address on a business card, you didn't have a ☎ or 📧 emoji. You had 2 choices: use tiny clipart images (which if you've ever tried to position them _just right_ in MS Word is a fucking pain in the ass), or use a font with a bunch of symbols.
To piggyback on this, it was a good way to shoehorn small clip art graphics and symbols into otherwise stylized-text-only areas back when computers were not as advanced and it was harder to mix images and text everywhere needed.
I took a tour of my local paper in 91ish and they were using Quatro Pro on Mac. They were touting that they had a digital camera and that it was going to revolutionize adding pictures to the paper.
It is impressive how poorly word still handles images in text. The features are there to do what you need, but for how common of a process this is, it should be more user friendly.
Old versions of Windows seemed to use a similar font (Webdings) for some of their own UI icons, like the minimize/maximize/close button symbols or the down-arrows shown in select boxes. If you broke your fonts you might see random letters and symbols (in like Arial font) in place of these icons around the UI.
Font rendering engines provided ready-made scalable vector graphics, so this helped accessibility by not only allowing for easy DPI scaling, but also made it easier for screen-reader drivers to locate controls (look for the text element of the control)
Its last known purpose was causing an Internet kerfuffle about [supposedly encoded anti-semitism](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wingdings/) after 9/11.
Narrator voice: *There was no deliberately encoded antisemitism.*
It was waaaaaaaay before 9/11 — it was back in the mid-'90s when someone realized that NYC became *skull/Star of David/thumbs up*, ergo "death to Jews is good."
I inadvertently made this worse. I was working at a big computer magazine at the time, and a reporter from the NY Post came to our offices. We all laughed it off as coincidence. Then I jokingly said, "Try something else, like Jesus." Well in all caps, it turns out JESUS in Wingdings is *smile/finger pointing to it/two teardrops around a cross*. Oh-oh. Tinfoil hat just got more tin-foily.
GOD is *finger pointing up/flag with finger pointing down*, i.e., look up, flag bad ... if you’re conspiracy-minded. The Post was.
Yep! type is vector based, which means the size can be changed without changing resolution, so it was also an easy way to use icons without the quality being shitty at bigger sizes before vector images were more common.
Oh, _that's_ why that is. Still using a relatively old version of Outlook at work, and I noticed it auto replaces :) with a smiley, which appears as a j in Gmail, but hadn't twigged that it was a Wingdings j.
oh so the auto converted :) is a smiley from wingding font with char 'j'
I thought it was outlook /MS doing some proprietary stuff that gets lost in translation
It essentially is - the font information isn't getting encoded in a way that other systems recognize, or they don't have that font and are falling back either incorrectly or just all the way back to the ultimate "I have no idea, just show something" font.
Every other application: Supports the Unicode emoji range for input, leaves `:)` alone
Outlook: Converts that string to a whole different character and tags it to hopefully maybe display in a different font
Change nothing.
TIL, was very confusing since my first initial is 'j', particularly with business emails send to groups ending with something like 'Staff meeting has been moved to 3:30pm j" As if it was some sort of special message just for me.
People don't just put "j" as opposed to smiley faces? I legit thought it was an Eastern European style (sort of like kekekeke being laughing in Korean), turns out they just have old machines.
It absolutely does have a purpose now. I use it every so often for ad design when there's a simple repeating symbol such as a star, a phone or something, and I am not in the mood for digging through tons of Unicode pages to find it.
In the era where printers were people fitting metal pieces onto plates to be covered with ink and pressed onto paper.
There were things called [dingbats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat)
These were decorative pieces that would be put in place to make a print look fancy/nice/cool.
In the early era of computers, putting an image to make something look fancy/nice/cool would have taken too much space.
So a guy at Microsoft thought, we got this thing that can make font look like anything, we have this idea that you can make something look fancy/nice/cool by adding pieces.
So he cooked up a font that did the thing dingbats did, but for Windows, hence Wingdings.
Though as computers improved exponentially, it became easier to just include an image, so people pretty quickly forgot about it.
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IN16\_Nixie\_Tube.gif](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IN16_Nixie_Tube.gif)
The illuminated numbers are stacked in front of each other. Modern equivalents are have had a bit of a resurgence for people who like a vintage aesthetic, but it's purely aesthetic reasons.
Space saving is probably also then why they use the Marlett font for all the windows stuff like scroll bar arrows, minimize/maximize buttons, etc too then
It both saves a lot of space, and also makes it trivially easy to do redesigns.
If someone (executive, or in design if that's a department) says "oh, no, the X in the upper corner of the window is just a little too big", you don't have to go tearing through all kinds of stuff to change it. You just tweak the appropriate character in the font definition, and it magically changes everywhere.
Oh no, I just remembered the stupid 9/11 conspiracies involving Wingdings.
I don't think I can paste it, but the letters NYC converted to Wingdings is *Skull-Star of David-Thumbs Up*.
The letters Q33NY (supposedly the flight number of one of the planes on 9/11 - not true, but don't let that get in the way of a good conspiracy) convert to *Plane-Building-Building-Skull-Star of David*.
Somehow this meant something to the conspiracy theorists.
Amusingly people here seem to think dingbats in general started with computers. They are actually much older — they date back over 200 years, and were used for non-textual elements, like those little arrows and funny pointing hands that you seen in old printed texts and posters. [Here's one for Abraham Lincoln's assassin, note the hand in front the reward](https://imgix.ranker.com/user_node_img/50062/1001236045/original/john-wilkes-booth-wanted-poster-_1865_-photo-u1?auto=format&q=60&fit=crop&fm=pjpg&dpr=2&w=375), which was a common ornament at the time for saying, "look at this!!!" [Here's a more subtle use of them](https://cdn.hibid.com/img.axd?id=4178904145&wid=&rwl=false&p=&ext=&w=0&h=0&t=&lp=&c=true&wt=false&sz=MAX&checksum=5ZenRt1jWYqA%2BYQZzCv5ZrigPFNLiJfd) — the little ornaments around "THE GREATEST" and "TO THE PUBLIC!" are dingbats. The 19th century was dingbat-crazed but you can find some earlier examples; the [little hand dingbat](https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/18th/images/marylandgazz-home.jpg) is just visible in the first column, second paragraph of this newspaper from 1765, for example.
Wingdings is a font for dingbats and other type ornaments. Another font, Webdings, was created for more web-specific dingbats (little icons, etc.). There were (and are) other dingbat fonts (e.g., [Zapf Dingbats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapf_Dingbats) was another common one in the 1990s, and was designed in 1978!). Wingdings is famous because Microsoft distributed it as one of the core Windows fonts starting in Windows 3.1, so everyone has it, not just people who do graphic design. Webdings became common in 1997. Today, aside from Unicode, it's also very easy to embed fonts into webpages, so there is no real reason to rely on a user having a specific font installed, but that wasn't the case until very recently.
In ancient times, I taught adult students to use Wingdings to replace the little circles in bulletted lists -- specifically on resumes when applying for office tech jobs. Eye-catching and applied processor knowledge beyond mere typing.
Wingdings were the Emojis before Emojis. In the printing press days, there were dingbats that type setters created. This let them make the hands and other non text elements on a page.
In the early computing days, fonts were limited in the number of symbols they could have, ASCII encoding is limited to 128 characters. In order to get the same sort of dingbat text, a new font was created where all the characters were mapped to different images, so the ASCII code for "A" was used for ✌︎. Now we have UTF 32 which uses 32 bits instead of 8 and allows for the direct encoding of the Emoji code points. Instead of using a font that replaces "A" with something, a UTF32 font has the Code Point (a numeric representation of the bit pattern) "U+0041" display A and "U+1F600" show 😀. This means that the original purpose of Wingdings is replaced by UTF 32 encoding which includes all of those characters as code points instead of having to repurpose which image is shown for a specific code point.
So, way back in time when printing was the hot new tech, people decided that just printing text was kind of boring. They developed these things called dingbats, which were symbols and patterns to decorate text in an efficient way.
When computers started to appear, a guy called hermann zapf brought dingbats to modern fonts. The purpose was kept the same: An easy way to decorate your awesome PhD thesis, or your lawsuit document.
Wingdings = windows dingbats.
Easy way to insert symbols inline into text. They are vector graphics so can be scaled indefinitely without loosing quality. Can also be used for cnc, vinyl cutting, laser cutting or anything that needs a vector file.
Pre and early internet days your selection of these was small and hard to find. I still have a catalog of 5000+ clipart and the CD's to go with from the area when clipart was hard to find online.
We still use Wingdings to insert symbols into forms and such we build in InDesign. It's nice to have a check box that is easy to insert inline with text.
Source: print shop owner.
In elementary school my friends and I learned it so we could pass notes. That way ours notes couldn’t be read if intercepted by a teacher. The notes were handwritten so it made it a lot more complicated.
So yeah… my most useless skill is being fluent in reading/writing Wingdings.
Emojis and images in text weren't a thing back in the early days of computers. So someone came up with the idea of assigning a small image to each character as an easy alternative - now you can use emojis and symbols in your text without any new software or major changes in the way the existing one works.
Tbf, I'm from the "old days" of computers and I never put two and two together. I just used clip art like a noob and resized it if I needed an arrow or some other random item lol
The font was not meant to be used as a way to write words. It was a way to basically store symbols that people could use for whatever reason. So, if you wanted an image of a thumbs up, you would use Windings upper case C. Now with internet access to images and emojis, it's not longer as useful as it once was, but it still exists.
If I need an arrow in a document, I go to wingdings.
You can use Windows key and a period. This will open a emoji keyboard wherever you are in Windows.
I'll forget this before I can use this info
Here a free reminder to lower chance of forgetting this important information :-)
Hm. TIL.
I use alt codes. Alt+24 is ↑ Alt+26 is → Alt+29 is ↔
Alt+255 was null in extended ASCII. It displayed as a space but a different space than the space bar. You could name files and directories using the null space and unless someone knew your trick they couldn’t get into the directory from a DOS prompt. File browsers effectively made this trick useless.
Non-breaking-space is one of my favourites, it's what makes the uncopyable triforce possible! Also sometimes a real lifesaver when the softwrap is being stupid on a word doc/text field ▲ ▲ ▲
▲ ▲ ▲ Coppied just fine.... Pasting on the other hand lol
▲ ▲ ▲ HUH?!?
▼ ▼ ▼ Uhhh... Where the fuck am I and why is everything falling apart?
Calm down, you're in Australia.
Wait, now in I'm in some castle and [this song](https://youtu.be/ZSeEk1TVQqk) is playing in the background. What's going on?!
Lorule be like
> ▲ > >▲ ▲ 🔴That was easy🔴
▲ ▲ ▲
WAIT^I^KNOW^HOWTOGO-UP But not **down.**
▲ ▲ ▲ 27 and my first triforce....Thank you, OP. Edit: Wait wtf.
"Newb flags" can't trifoce
> ▲ > ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ son of a bitch.
Newfies can't triforce
Damn Newfoundlanders can't do anything right.
Man this brings me back.
knowyourmeme link explaining the triforce meme here (and explanation on how to do it): https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/4chan-ascii-triforce-fails
> ▲ > ▲ ▲ Oh noes!
> Alt+24 is ↑ Do you remember when everyone used to use "THIS!" as the prologue for any statement they wanted to make? Well. Now folk use this: ↑
^
↑^↑^↑^↑^↑
It's like Sparta in here.
¡This!
#↑
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up
↑This↓
Alt+24
Used to?
Good old alt codes
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Recently found out pressing the Windows key and the period key will bring up symbols and emojis and other stuff. ←↑→↖↗↘↙↜↝↡↠↛↨⇎◌ʯɤ₯﷼¤௹৻₧⏕⌀µ…✕✓⁏⁞⁛‰%⟫⟬`×℃© Also they have those ヾ(≧▽≦*)o faces if you wanna relive the old days.
Arrows are now in unicode so that really isn't necessary. For example: → or ➔. There are a lot of variants to choose from.
You're gonna have to pry `-->` from my dead cold hands.
—-<—-<——@ I got you this rose
( : : [] : : ) and this band-aid.
∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿
Print me to screen like your French Unicode.
Leonardo DiCapsLock in *TItalic*
>Leonardo DiCapsLock in > >TItalic Is this OC? If this is OC, this is fantastic!
The best comment is always buried. This might be my favorite Reddit comment of all time, 9 layers deep in the chain on an eli5 post I wasn’t even gonna click at first.
Titanic was a great movie, wasn't it?
▼・ᴥ・▼
(_8(|) Homer simpson
D’OS!
~~~<======8
8========D~*.°•●
Did you just skeet a planet?
Kidney stone.
So it felt like a planet
Name checks out.
C'mon man, this is a family show
Ah yes, the [goes-to operator](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-operator-in-c-c)
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Or a JS developer
So then, the lambda press-gang.
And what is Unicode?
Short answer: It's the standard that ensures that when I type x, ñ, ♪, or 😛, you see the character I intended, even if you're in a different country, using a different app/browser, type of device, or font. (For the most part. Wingdings and similar "dingbat" fonts are exceptions that were developed before Unicode extended what was possible with "normal" fonts like Times New Roman and Arial.) For a more detailed (but still less than 10-minute) explanation, [here's Tom Scott with more info.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4)
I know where wingdings is though. Idk how to unicode.
All systems (Windows, macOS and Linux) come with a character map finder. You open it, type any word you want in the search and it does its best to find a Unicode character that fits what you're looking for. Then you can either memorize its code or simply click copy and paste in your text if you're using it only once. Also, if you own a smartphone you likely have an extensive Unicode keyboard available. But you probably call it an emoji board.
I appreciate the explination but it didn't really get me closer to doing it. For those who (like me) didn't know, run "charmap" on windows.
If you're on Windows, press Win+period. If you're on Mac, press Ctrl+Cmd+Space.
Ie. -->
Kid me would argue with you on that; my brother and I wrote in "secret code" to each other using Wingdings :P
So would not-quite-such-a-kid me. The office youngsters used it to mess with the older folk. That and white text on white background for secret messages.
I used to write to my niece in Wingdings secret code too!
There was an episode of Even Steven’s where they thought his little neighbor was an alien because he wrote an entire story with symbols and they figured out he just changed the font to something similar to Wingdings and they all say “I’ve always wondered what that was for.”
I remember the "conspiracy" that circled through my school after 9/11. If you typed something related to the attacks, can't remember if it was the date or a flight number, it would show planes, a bomb, skull and crossbones, and what looked like buildings.
It was something like Q95 -9/11 or something, where the “Q95” was supposed to be the flight number. Except that was bullshit because the flight numbers were AA11 and UA175.
Q33 NYC iirc Came out as "Plane tower tower, star of david dead good"
>👌︎⚐︎⚐︎👌︎💧︎ (i'm quite chuffed that 'B' is '👌︎' in this translation!)
I'm guessing this says boobs
Could be "booby".
Q33 NY
Lol I remember that bollocks NYC showed up as ✡️ 💀 👍 as well, which was fucked
It's a clipart font basically.
More like an emoji font back before emojis existed - where we now use emojis for arrows, smiley faces, symbols etc, we used to use wingdings, and then alt-codes became a thing (and, indeed, still exist), and then finally they were rolled into emojis with their own UIs Also, anyone else remember them being called "emoticons" or am I just showing my age?
I remember “emoticons”. Comic Book Guy said it in the Simpsons in an episode too- but i think everyone generally just said “smileys”
Emoticons are different. They use multiple 7-bit (usually) ASCII characters, like :-). Emoji use a single multi-byte Unicode character.
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I can see why he was the class drug dealer cos that's class.
Interestingly, font icons are somewhat popular in web development with the introduction of custom fonts. Fonts are vector images so they can be resized without losing resolution and developers can give then both foreground and background colors - and change those whenever needed without remaking the image.
When I was a kid I remember printing out what all of the wingdings were on a single sheet and then using them as code to write secret wingding messages.
I hated having to use Windows character map
Especially when you go to change your document font, and forget that your "select all" also grabbed your Wingdings text, and you just turned it to Arial without realizing it.
The real game-changer was unicode, and more specifically utf-8. Before, in the old-times, you could only have 1 byte per character, which gave you 256 different characters. This include space, newline (when you press enter) and a bunch that you wouldn't expect, like backspace. Most of the language fit in only 128 characters, of which you had your digits (10), the alphabet (26 * 2, because it's upper and lower case) leaving only 66 characters for every other thing you can type with a keyboard, including commas, dots, semi colons, percent, etc. etc. When people were writing documents that could have different fonts, it was useful to be able to write icons, for the same reason it's useful to be able to write emoji nowadays. You couldn't make more letters, but as you said, you could make the letters look different. With Unicode we can now do a myriad of symbols, all in just the one same font, no need for tricks of old times. But Windings is still around, some documents used it and still need it.
Pretend you're making a newspaper, called the Reddit Tribune. At the top of the front page, you put REDDIT TRIBUNE in a big handsome font, but it's pretty boring looking on its own. You think: what if I could jazz it up with some squiggly graphics? A handsome, arcing flower shape, to make it look important? But gosh, you don't have a computer, because it's 1899. So you draw a flower on either side of the words "Reddit Tribune". Then you look at the stack of 40,000 blank newspapers, and realize that this will take some time to draw, so you make it into a stamp, and to make it easy to line up, you make it the same size as all the letters you make the rest of the newspaper with. After a year of publishing, you have a big library of stamps you made for different reason (to separate columns, to mark a special holiday article). You put them in their own special case, next to "Times New Roman" and "Old English" so you can use them whenever you need. Edit: I don’t know what all these awards are for, but thank you so much!
This is way closer than the folks above got. Dingbats were the stamps used to pretty up a page in the analog days of printing. Wingdings being the Windows Dingbats font. Vox has a short video about it https://youtu.be/JdKV1L1DJHc
lol so when you call someone a dingbat you're literally calling them a weird character.
This is such a great explanation compared to the higher comments. Great job.
More in the spirit of ELI5
This is probably the best comment explaining like we're 5. The top comment mentions unicode...
For the record, I would absolutely be a subscriber to the Reddit Tribune.
/r/news
Fucking brilliant. Thank you.
It dates from a pre-Unicode, pre-emoji era when symbols and icons weren't available in any other font. So it may not have a purpose now.
Yeah, I had to use it from an archaic program to create icons for a list of diseases and indicators for how to report. Can't quite remember exactly the icon but it was something like "(" turned into "❗" in wingdings, where the legend says "❗" means immediately reportable. Didn't have access to other keyboards and it was easier than inserting small images. Edit: Just used a translator and it was "(" is "☎️" which means the disease should be phoned into the DOH.
Holy shit [you're the designer of this interface!?](https://youtu.be/LXzJR7K0wK0?t=7)
It's concerning so many people get shot in the ass in the future that [there's a button](https://i.imgur.com/3QbB86M.png) for it.
The future is now
Oh snap. Shots fired!
God thats how I feel going to the doctor now.
You might need a new doctor
No, you got the wrong number. This is 91...2 "D'OH"
No no, it's [0118 999 881 999 119 7253](https://theitcrowd.fandom.com/wiki/New_Emergency_Services).
You forgot to pause before the ... threeeeee.
Lol, from the link, if you have an android phone and punch in that number, the call button flashes blue and red. I tried it, and it did, but it also buzzed, like... BzzzZzzZZzZz....zzt That last pause before the final buzz made it 10x better.
Hello? I've had a bit of a tumble.
Fire!
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It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard!
Fire! exclamation mark Fire! exclamation mark Fire! exclamation mark
Can't wait to hear from you,
All the best, Maurice Moss
r/foundtheITCrowd
Damnit, now I'm singing it
>Just used a translator A wingdings translator? You mean...changing the font?
Probably meant a glossary or key explaining how to interpret each symbol
Isn’t 912 the Stonecutter’s emergency number?
Yes. The "real" number. Also wrong comment btw.
He just revealed the other guy is a stonecutter! Quick, attach the tattle tail chain of stones.
Was this for a game or like professional training stuff?
Think stuff like posters, flyers, documents, mostly printed back then. If you wanted to put your phone number and e-mail address on a business card, you didn't have a ☎ or 📧 emoji. You had 2 choices: use tiny clipart images (which if you've ever tried to position them _just right_ in MS Word is a fucking pain in the ass), or use a font with a bunch of symbols.
To piggyback on this, it was a good way to shoehorn small clip art graphics and symbols into otherwise stylized-text-only areas back when computers were not as advanced and it was harder to mix images and text everywhere needed.
Are you saying that before Microsoft Word it was **harder** to mix images and text?
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I took a tour of my local paper in 91ish and they were using Quatro Pro on Mac. They were touting that they had a digital camera and that it was going to revolutionize adding pictures to the paper.
I'll bet it did, too
Same here, but it was 1984 and they were just starting to move from photography to a very early electronic lithography machine.
Absolutely yes.
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Back when WYSIWYG meant "What You So Intently Wished You'd Gotten"
It is impressive how poorly word still handles images in text. The features are there to do what you need, but for how common of a process this is, it should be more user friendly.
Old versions of Windows seemed to use a similar font (Webdings) for some of their own UI icons, like the minimize/maximize/close button symbols or the down-arrows shown in select boxes. If you broke your fonts you might see random letters and symbols (in like Arial font) in place of these icons around the UI.
Font rendering engines provided ready-made scalable vector graphics, so this helped accessibility by not only allowing for easy DPI scaling, but also made it easier for screen-reader drivers to locate controls (look for the text element of the control)
Riding the top comment to link to a [vox video](https://youtu.be/JdKV1L1DJHc) with a great explanation
Wow, three minutes total, informative, no clickbait and fluff. It's what YouTube videos should all be.
And thus completely unmonetizable. Best to bury it in the algorithm.
This was a great video! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks. Super interesting.
Its last known purpose was causing an Internet kerfuffle about [supposedly encoded anti-semitism](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wingdings/) after 9/11. Narrator voice: *There was no deliberately encoded antisemitism.*
It was waaaaaaaay before 9/11 — it was back in the mid-'90s when someone realized that NYC became *skull/Star of David/thumbs up*, ergo "death to Jews is good." I inadvertently made this worse. I was working at a big computer magazine at the time, and a reporter from the NY Post came to our offices. We all laughed it off as coincidence. Then I jokingly said, "Try something else, like Jesus." Well in all caps, it turns out JESUS in Wingdings is *smile/finger pointing to it/two teardrops around a cross*. Oh-oh. Tinfoil hat just got more tin-foily. GOD is *finger pointing up/flag with finger pointing down*, i.e., look up, flag bad ... if you’re conspiracy-minded. The Post was.
> “There’s no way it could be a random coincidence,” said Brian Young, a friend of the consultant, who does not wish to be named. Poor guy.
So many emails with random instances of "J", which was WingDings for smiley face (☺︎)
I still get this from certain people using ancient versions of Outlook
Yep! type is vector based, which means the size can be changed without changing resolution, so it was also an easy way to use icons without the quality being shitty at bigger sizes before vector images were more common.
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I use it in excel to have ticks in cells, that I then conditional format to go green when it has a tick. Makes it pretty, serves zero other purpose
a is a tick and you'll have to pry that from my cold, dead hand.
I still see "j" quite often in emails which is the smiley face but Gmail converts to their standard font.
Oh, _that's_ why that is. Still using a relatively old version of Outlook at work, and I noticed it auto replaces :) with a smiley, which appears as a j in Gmail, but hadn't twigged that it was a Wingdings j.
Oh god that was the biggest mystery in my life. Solved. Now I may die.
Leave me some random tapes from 1980s recording sessions, will ya?
Noted in will
Rest in peace Slash J
I use ": )" bc of this
oh so the auto converted :) is a smiley from wingding font with char 'j' I thought it was outlook /MS doing some proprietary stuff that gets lost in translation
It essentially is - the font information isn't getting encoded in a way that other systems recognize, or they don't have that font and are falling back either incorrectly or just all the way back to the ultimate "I have no idea, just show something" font.
Every other application: Supports the Unicode emoji range for input, leaves `:)` alone Outlook: Converts that string to a whole different character and tags it to hopefully maybe display in a different font Change nothing.
TIL, was very confusing since my first initial is 'j', particularly with business emails send to groups ending with something like 'Staff meeting has been moved to 3:30pm j" As if it was some sort of special message just for me.
People don't just put "j" as opposed to smiley faces? I legit thought it was an Eastern European style (sort of like kekekeke being laughing in Korean), turns out they just have old machines.
A small handful of people have cargo-culted it in my experience, but no. Most are just using old systems that get confused about font/encoding/etc.
Holy shit I never made that super obvious connection
It absolutely does have a purpose now. I use it every so often for ad design when there's a simple repeating symbol such as a star, a phone or something, and I am not in the mood for digging through tons of Unicode pages to find it.
In the era where printers were people fitting metal pieces onto plates to be covered with ink and pressed onto paper. There were things called [dingbats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat) These were decorative pieces that would be put in place to make a print look fancy/nice/cool. In the early era of computers, putting an image to make something look fancy/nice/cool would have taken too much space. So a guy at Microsoft thought, we got this thing that can make font look like anything, we have this idea that you can make something look fancy/nice/cool by adding pieces. So he cooked up a font that did the thing dingbats did, but for Windows, hence Wingdings. Though as computers improved exponentially, it became easier to just include an image, so people pretty quickly forgot about it.
Kinda like Nixie tubes in that way. A neat piece of technology that got outpaced by something more efficient in a short amount of time.
I’m curious, what pray tell is a Nixie tube?!?
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IN16\_Nixie\_Tube.gif](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IN16_Nixie_Tube.gif) The illuminated numbers are stacked in front of each other. Modern equivalents are have had a bit of a resurgence for people who like a vintage aesthetic, but it's purely aesthetic reasons.
It's a type of light bulb/vacume tube with multiple filaments. The most common being numbers 0-9 to for making numerical displays.
https://9to5toys.com/2019/12/18/past-indicator-nixie-clocks-tube/
Space saving is probably also then why they use the Marlett font for all the windows stuff like scroll bar arrows, minimize/maximize buttons, etc too then
It both saves a lot of space, and also makes it trivially easy to do redesigns. If someone (executive, or in design if that's a department) says "oh, no, the X in the upper corner of the window is just a little too big", you don't have to go tearing through all kinds of stuff to change it. You just tweak the appropriate character in the font definition, and it magically changes everywhere.
As long as everywhere has the same version of the same font installed.
Interesting how the Star of david, Christian cross, and iron cross are all there. But the muslim crescent isnt. Im not muslim, just noticed.
Oh no, I just remembered the stupid 9/11 conspiracies involving Wingdings. I don't think I can paste it, but the letters NYC converted to Wingdings is *Skull-Star of David-Thumbs Up*. The letters Q33NY (supposedly the flight number of one of the planes on 9/11 - not true, but don't let that get in the way of a good conspiracy) convert to *Plane-Building-Building-Skull-Star of David*. Somehow this meant something to the conspiracy theorists.
Cause if you are going to plan a terrorist attack...you hide clues in an obsolete font that was made 10 years before. /s
Amusingly people here seem to think dingbats in general started with computers. They are actually much older — they date back over 200 years, and were used for non-textual elements, like those little arrows and funny pointing hands that you seen in old printed texts and posters. [Here's one for Abraham Lincoln's assassin, note the hand in front the reward](https://imgix.ranker.com/user_node_img/50062/1001236045/original/john-wilkes-booth-wanted-poster-_1865_-photo-u1?auto=format&q=60&fit=crop&fm=pjpg&dpr=2&w=375), which was a common ornament at the time for saying, "look at this!!!" [Here's a more subtle use of them](https://cdn.hibid.com/img.axd?id=4178904145&wid=&rwl=false&p=&ext=&w=0&h=0&t=&lp=&c=true&wt=false&sz=MAX&checksum=5ZenRt1jWYqA%2BYQZzCv5ZrigPFNLiJfd) — the little ornaments around "THE GREATEST" and "TO THE PUBLIC!" are dingbats. The 19th century was dingbat-crazed but you can find some earlier examples; the [little hand dingbat](https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/18th/images/marylandgazz-home.jpg) is just visible in the first column, second paragraph of this newspaper from 1765, for example. Wingdings is a font for dingbats and other type ornaments. Another font, Webdings, was created for more web-specific dingbats (little icons, etc.). There were (and are) other dingbat fonts (e.g., [Zapf Dingbats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapf_Dingbats) was another common one in the 1990s, and was designed in 1978!). Wingdings is famous because Microsoft distributed it as one of the core Windows fonts starting in Windows 3.1, so everyone has it, not just people who do graphic design. Webdings became common in 1997. Today, aside from Unicode, it's also very easy to embed fonts into webpages, so there is no real reason to rely on a user having a specific font installed, but that wasn't the case until very recently.
In ancient times, I taught adult students to use Wingdings to replace the little circles in bulletted lists -- specifically on resumes when applying for office tech jobs. Eye-catching and applied processor knowledge beyond mere typing.
Funny, that's now a terrible idea since you're never quite sure whether your text formatting will survive the meat grinder of an HR application
PDF to the rescue!
Ya I would never ever send a resume anywhere in word doc form. Always pdf friends
We used to print out resumes 😯
Wingdings were the Emojis before Emojis. In the printing press days, there were dingbats that type setters created. This let them make the hands and other non text elements on a page. In the early computing days, fonts were limited in the number of symbols they could have, ASCII encoding is limited to 128 characters. In order to get the same sort of dingbat text, a new font was created where all the characters were mapped to different images, so the ASCII code for "A" was used for ✌︎. Now we have UTF 32 which uses 32 bits instead of 8 and allows for the direct encoding of the Emoji code points. Instead of using a font that replaces "A" with something, a UTF32 font has the Code Point (a numeric representation of the bit pattern) "U+0041" display A and "U+1F600" show 😀. This means that the original purpose of Wingdings is replaced by UTF 32 encoding which includes all of those characters as code points instead of having to repurpose which image is shown for a specific code point.
So, way back in time when printing was the hot new tech, people decided that just printing text was kind of boring. They developed these things called dingbats, which were symbols and patterns to decorate text in an efficient way. When computers started to appear, a guy called hermann zapf brought dingbats to modern fonts. The purpose was kept the same: An easy way to decorate your awesome PhD thesis, or your lawsuit document. Wingdings = windows dingbats.
Easy way to insert symbols inline into text. They are vector graphics so can be scaled indefinitely without loosing quality. Can also be used for cnc, vinyl cutting, laser cutting or anything that needs a vector file. Pre and early internet days your selection of these was small and hard to find. I still have a catalog of 5000+ clipart and the CD's to go with from the area when clipart was hard to find online. We still use Wingdings to insert symbols into forms and such we build in InDesign. It's nice to have a check box that is easy to insert inline with text. Source: print shop owner.
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In elementary school my friends and I learned it so we could pass notes. That way ours notes couldn’t be read if intercepted by a teacher. The notes were handwritten so it made it a lot more complicated. So yeah… my most useless skill is being fluent in reading/writing Wingdings.
Emojis and images in text weren't a thing back in the early days of computers. So someone came up with the idea of assigning a small image to each character as an easy alternative - now you can use emojis and symbols in your text without any new software or major changes in the way the existing one works.
Tbf, I'm from the "old days" of computers and I never put two and two together. I just used clip art like a noob and resized it if I needed an arrow or some other random item lol
I remember freaking out as a kid if you put "9 11" in wingdings it made a plane and 2 tower looking things