Introduction
When I was regularly working with common specialized font faces about a decade ago, I constructed a Microsoft Excel worksheet to serve as a map of fairly common specialized font faces. As I used it an hour ago to look up a couple of characters in the Wingdings font face that has shipped with Windows for as long as I can remember, it occurred to me that others would benefit from it.
Background
When you select any of the specialized fonts, such as Wingdings, that are covered by the table, then start typing, whatever you type is rendered in the selected font, which isn't very useful. Since you usually need only a character or two, it's much more efficient to look it up in a chart than to play guessing games with the keyboard.
Using the code
Since the chart is quite wide, and requires access to all of the fonts to render correctly, I included it in both Excel and one-page HTML formats, both of which are in the article download.
Using the table is straightforward.
- Locate the column labeled with the name of the font you want to use. For instance, Wingdings are in column H.
- Scan down the column until you see the image that you want.
- Look in column A of the row that you identified in step 2. Make note not only of the letter, but whether it is upper or lower case. Upper and lower case letters almost always render a completely different glyph for the corresponding upper and lower case letters.
Points of Interest
Saving as a single-page HTML file is a fairly recent, and pr
History
2019/05/14 is the initial publication date.
