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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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. :)
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://techdocs.altium.com/sites/default/files/resize/wiki_attachments/296931/Mooretronics_Font-795x122.png" rel="nofollow">https://techdocs.altium.com/sites/default/files/resize/wiki_...</a>
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. :)
As the article mentions, the Macintosh had a similar font years before.<p>I recall a very early Macintosh game even used a custom font for its sprites.