I spent a little time over the weekend scanning through the
wingdings font looking at the glyphs and I believe that
approx 100 of the approx 256 glyphs map fully correctly to existing
unicode symbols, arrows, technical and misc.
I have put up a comparison webpage at
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/wingdings/proposal/
if anyone would like to comment on the ones that I
couldn't see a mapping for (I can thing of no good way to
figure out a mapping for wingdings except by visual
comparison)
There are quite a few cases where mappings to similar but
different existing glyphs suggest possible variations on
the existing unicode chars, for instance there exists
270E;LOWER RIGHT PENCIL
270F;PENCIL
2710;UPPER RIGHT PENCIL
but the wingding's pencil is more of a
"LOWER LEFT PENCIL"
And there exists a correct mapping to
CIRCLED HEAVY WHITE RIGHTWARDS ARROW
but wingdings needs all the other directions as well, which are not
in unicode.
Where there is a similar glyph but not really a correct mapping, I
have included the similar one and a name that I would expect to
be associated with a fully correct glyph. There are a large number of
arrows which I didn't match to existing ones as I didn't think the existing
ones really fit the bill, comments would be welcome.
I can imagine that symbols such as "BELL", "BOOK" and "CANDLE" are
hardly a high priority for addition to unicode, but what was the
basis for selecting the existing dingbats symbols, the fact that
they already existed in Zaph Dingbats ?. On that basis do the
microsoft wingdings have equal validity for inclusion into unicode ?
C.
Real Life: Caolan McNamara * Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie * Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan * Sig: an oblique strategy
Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistancy
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