2016-10-06 21:03 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > > * "Wingdings", "Wingdings 2", are here again maaping various forms of > > arrows and arrow heads, plus some emojis or enclosed characters, or > > decorative characters. "Wingdings" also includes another Windows logo > > at position 0xFF; these fonts are not mapped to Unicode but to 8-bit > > code positions 0x21..0xFF. > > * "Wingdings 3" uses a mix of non-Unicode mappings in 0x21..0xFF and > > some characters and other regular Unicode positions (in 0x2000.. > > 0X9FFF) multiple times (every block of 0x100 code positions, i.e. each > > glyph is mapped 128 or 129 times in that font). None of these > > characters have a Unicode mapping. > > It's true that the Wingdings and Webdings fonts themselves, which date > back to the 1990s, are "symbol fonts" with glyphs mapped to the ASCII > range. However, to clear up any possible confusion, all glyphs in these > fonts have had actual Unicode mappings since version 7.0 (June 2014). > These mappings exist theoretically but not in these fonts themselves (notably not when there are multiple variants of the same encoded characters, notably for many arrows and arrow heads).
The 3 glyphs for the Earth globe (centered on Americas, or Europe+Africa or South/East Asia+Australia) are not distinguished at all in Unicode (I've not seen any sequence with variants selectors to help distinguishinhg them, and there are some fonts showing the Earth globe centered on the Antarctic). Unicode seems to also allow the character to show a flat Mercator map centered on these positions, or other projections, as the encoded character just means "Earth". So no, the mappings are theoretical and allow wide variations, that these fonts purposely want to distinguish. They are used without directly without using any Unicode mapping, for internal implementation reasons, or specific meanings in specific applications, or because this makes a coherent graphical design for an UI (fonts are used for this prupose, but many applications do not need fonts for this usage, they just use collections of icons, frequently packed in a ZIP/JAR archive, or using CSS selectors in SVG files, or hidden in their graphic source code by directly using drawing APIs, in which they can add custom visual effects such as animations, glowing, transparency, custom superpositions and compositions custom layouts and interaction with user events or application events and states). Using the Unicode mappings in these fonts would not allow selecting the appropriate dinctiguished glyphs, the UI would become confusive or no longer usable or would create a ugly patchwork.
