Using special symbols and glyphs as bullet characters

You may wish to use characters in certain "picture fonts" (namely Wingdings, Symbol, ZapfDingbats, etc.) as bullets for some paragraphs. They look fine in FrameMaker and Word, but when you generate output with ePublisher, the pictures are gone, replaced instead by a regular character (or nothing at all).

Wingdings characters present a particular challenge when working with HTML-based content. Since Wingdings (as well as a few other "symbol" fonts) conflicts with the Unicode character map, many browsers simply don't support it. Internet Explorer skirts the issue and displays these characters correctly. However, FireFox follows the W3 Consortium standards which dictate that only Unicode fonts should be supported. Additionally, you may run into the issue of user font support; many end users simply don't have the Wingdings font installed on their system, and the characters therefore will not appear correctly. For these reasons, it is always best to choose a Unicode character or an image when selecting an appropriate bullet.

You can check the Windows Character Map (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map) for supported characters. Check "Advanced View," and set the Character Set to Unicode. Anything found there should be compatible with most browsers.

Another useful resource is this website, which includes a Unicode search engine for finding named characters: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm

Alternatively, you can take a screenshot of the non-unicode character you wish to use, and use the image as a bullet by placing it in your project's Files folder and choosing the image from the appropriate paragraph style's Bullet properties in the Style Designer.

CategorySolutionsGraphics

Permalinks/Solutions/Graphics/SpecialSymbolsAsBullets (last edited 2009-04-28 21:15:37 by LaurenLever)