From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Oct 14 2007 - 04:01:22 CDT
> James Kass
> >Regarding the name "Dingbats", it is named like this only because of a
> >popular Adobe font popularized in Postscript printers (popularized itself
> by
> >Apple in MacOS).
>
> Quoting from Wikipedia,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat
> "The term supposedly originated as onomatopoeia in old
> style metal-type print shops, where extra space around
> text or illustrations would be filled by "ding"ing an
> ornament into the space then "bat"ing tight to be ready
> for inking [citation needed]."
Unverified assertions. The fact is that it became popular only because of
PostScript, and the encoding of the Dingbats block is following the order of
the Adobe encoding (except for those characters that were already encoded
and with which they were unified: this creates some holes in the block, but
many fonts display the same characters for these holes as in the PostScript
encoding, assuming that a simple base code point is added to the legacy
8-bit Postscript code map, even if the standard unified codepoints are also
displayed with the same glyphs).
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