Webdings and Wingdings Fonts in Firefox

Webdings and wingdings Fonts can be made available in Firefox.  (#wingdings)

|| that’s all  (´(´), ’(’), and as arial -- that’s all  (´(´), ’(’) ) ||     ¥ z Q

Any changes that you make to the fonts, apply only to your own system, the main purpose here is so that you can see pages the same in Firefox as seen in Internet Explorer.  I did include a barcode font described on my Mail Merge page (Excel & MS Word) just to show that any fonts you added to your Windows system can also be made available in Firefox.

Writing your own HTML then you should be using HTML escapes or Unicode characters, though you may not find a substitute for everything even in Unicode.  For more information on symbols used in HTML see my Symbols page.

I just wanted to be able to include some symbols regardless of the browser.  On my search page are some symbols at the top which are fine in Internet Explorer but no good in Firefox.  I have included some JavaScript on the search page to spell out some of the material that would otherwise be completely ambiguous.  Can't use UDF-8 either for the webpage because that would mess up Internet Explorer.  An attempt to use images proved unwieldy.  Found the solution though in adding the fonts to Firefox as follows: 

This customization, if wanted, usually has to be redone after each upgrade to Firefox.  [Windows fonts]

The following workaround is only for pre Firefox 3 as fontEncoding.properties file is not found/used in Firefox 3 and I can't find any solution for Firefox 3. 
  Bug 424610 - Wingdings-font characters display incorrectly; fontEncoding.properties hack is gone
  Bug 411604 - rich messages (HTML) do not render wingdings font (a symbol font) e.g. displays "J" instead of ☺ smiley
  Bug 90643   - Does not render symbol font as commanded by CSS
 
If documents are under your control you can recode wingdings, but not all browsers will pick up unicode and sizes and alignment vary, see Wingdings character set and equivalent Unicode characters, even on Vista there are still at least 85 wingding characters that have no Unicode equivalent.

To Make Webdings and Wingdings available ♦  make the following changes: 
#-- Free 3 of 9 barcode available from Matthew Welch http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/
#-- fixing by hand -- Enabling Symbol font for Mozilla on Windows
#-- http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/Wfonts.html
#-- file:///c:/program files/Mozilla Firefox/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties
# Symbol font
#encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
encoding.free3of9.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings2.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings3.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.webdings.ttf = windows-1252

#For the changes above, use an editor (HTML-Kit) that will not make it CRLF, must be LF -- Do Not Use NOTEPAD. 
#-- for Mozilla file is file:///c:/program files/Mozilla/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties
#-- for Firefox portable file is #-- file:///F:/FirefoxPortable/App/firefox/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties

Once completed you should be able to see:  symbol(D delta),  webdings(‡ skier‡),  wingdings(( black phone, ♦ star, ¥ target, z point of interest, Q airplane),  wingdings 2(' white phone, R check mark in a box, ù 3 stars),  and wingdings 3(_ arrow) in Mozilla just like you; would see in Internet Explorer.  If those are correct you should be able to see this Font Table on your PC system exactly as it appears in IE on your PC system. 

‡  In the example above the double dagger(‡) symbol ‡ or ‡ has been substituted for Windows ‡ and still shows a skier in a successfully implemented webdings font.

Windows characters 130-159 (x'80'-x'8F') are considered invalid by W3C standards, though widely recognized and in use from the 1980's and now registered as the windows-1252 code page (Win-Latin1) at IANA [ref, ref.] and are described in The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup document.

Short test for superscript/subscript, okay in firefox where x^n_i renders correctly as x^n_i, but IE6 displays as xⁿ_i as if it was xⁿ_i   [Ref]

Related   (#related)

• Firefox Customizations (Notes), of which this page was formerly a part of until 2010-04-17.
• SYMBOLS for HTML and Excel Use