Dings go Dong! in FireFox...

...or rather thunk! I was poking around a few sites the other day and noticed that FireFox ignores most of the font symbols site owners used... it seems "Dings" are ignored which is a bit of a concern as it's not like they are the latest and greatest form of rocket science.

WingDings have been around since 1990 (wikipedia.org ~ Wingdings), they even have a little urban myth attached to them "Microsoft's Wingdings font includes hidden anti-Semitic and 9/11-referential messages." but WebDings didn't follow until 1997 (wikipedia.org ~ Webdings), now being a bit of a Dinger myself it does cause some concern as the popularity of FireFox grows as we have a character map presentation table of both WingDings and WebDings and as per the FireFox norm, both fail to display as intended. If you're confused as to what I'm prattling on about spring open your browser....

throw http://www.bee.geek.nz/Character_Map_of_WingDings/ into Internet Explorer and again into Firefox. As you can see by the screenshot below, IE to the left displays the page as intended, FireFox to the right ignores the use of the font completely.

I'm a bit of a stickler for things being as they should so this little FireFox quirk was right up there on my "makes me twitchy" list so I headed off to find a solution... bless Googles cotton socks for dishing up exactly what I was after

Case Western Reserve University has released an article Font Use Guidelines and Information detailing my exact problem and a quick fix. In summary, all that is required is an few more lines of text in my fontEncoding.properties file so I headed in the pointed direction of C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res\fonts\ grabbed fontEncoding.properties, opened it with WordPad.. breathed deep...

located the following lines of text...
# Symbol font
## encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding

and replaced it with...
# Symbol font
## encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
# Symbol font
#encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
#-- fixing by hand -- Enabling Symbol font for Mozilla on Windows
#-- file://C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties
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

saved fontEncoding.properties, restarted FireFox and headed back to http://www.bee.geek.nz/Character_Map_of_WingDings/

it worked a treat!

This only works per system and after a little bit of poking around it appears the file could possibly be overwritten with future FireFox updates... but that's ok, I can live with it can now my dings are dings again... I was never really partial to dongs

If you find the FireFox Ding quirk equally as annoying trot along and check out Case Western Reserve University's fully article and instructions Font Use Guidelines and Information

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