Wingdings smiley not showing in Mail

Question

Wingdings smiley not showing in Mail

This worked fine until I upgraded to Snow Leopard, but now I can't see the basic Wingdings smiley that everyone uses on the Microsoft Outlook side. I only see the capital J, even with the font palette open and verifying that Wingdings was/is the chosen font.

I use Suitcase Fusion 2 v 13.2.2 (latest) and did a clean install. It also still works on my Leopard-based MacBook.

Anyone have a tip or solution? 😟

Unibody MacBook 2.4, Mac OS X (10.5.8), iMac Aluminum 20

Posted on Jan 9, 2010 10:53 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 12, 2010 2:11 PM in response to Michael Tchong

For those of you struggling with this problem, here's confirmation from Extensis that it's an OS bug:

I get the same behavior in OS X 10.6. With Both Fusion 2 and the
Operating System managing the fonts. Even with the OS X installed
opentype wingdings font.

Fusion 2 activates fonts on the system making them available to
applications. It should have no affect on how the application displays
the font.

I did a little research and it appears other 10.6 users are experiencing
the same behavior.

Perhaps it is not supported in mail on 10.6...or it's possibly a bug in
mail.

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Jan 12, 2010 3:39 PM in response to Michael Tchong

Isn't this being caused by some people using legacy Wingdings fonts where the smiley is mapped to J, while OS X uses modern Unicode Wingdings where the smiley is mapped to U+ F04A? I have no problem sending myself Wingdings smileys in Mail.

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Answer 3

Jan 12, 2010 3:44 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

In that case you would be able to see the smiley, but neither the technician nor I could see them. Besides, it works fine on my old MacBook and Leopard.

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Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Jan 12, 2010 3:52 PM in response to Michael Tchong

In that case you would be able to see the smiley, but neither the technician nor I could see them.

You can't see the smiley if your Wingdings font doesn't have it at the codepoint where J belongs (U+004A) but has it elsewhere instead.

Besides, it works fine on my old MacBook and Leopard.

Perhaps they have Wingding fonts with the non-Unicode mapping on them.

Email me and I'll send you smiley to test (tom at bluesky dot org).

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Answer 5

Mar 23, 2010 10:30 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

I'm going to give this a bump in hope of a solution.

Wingdings doesn't work for me either in Mail. But displays fine in FontBook.

Tired of seeing "J" instead of a smiley.

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Answer 6

ejtttje

Level 1

0 points

Apr 19, 2010 4:27 PM in response to Timothy B Hewitt

Yes, I also have this problem. In fact, using TextEdit or Mail.app, I am unable to use the Wingdings font (or related Webdings, Wingdings 2/3). Whenever I select the font, it will use Lucida Grande instead.

However, in Pages if I select Wingdings it does display the font. So strange! I'd like to see smileys and not 'J' in my messages please! 🙂

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Apr 20, 2010 7:22 AM in response to Timothy B Hewitt

Tired of seeing "J" instead of a smiley.

The only way to see a smiley instead of a J is for you to have a legacy non-Unicode wingdings font on your system and for your apps to support using that font. OS X is really not designed to do that, and making it work would be going backwards in technology.

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Answer 8

Apr 24, 2010 6:07 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

"... making it work would be going backwards in technology."

I see it that losing compatibility with 'universal' fonts is going backwards in technology. Back to the bad old days of Macs and PCs not playing together.

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Answer 9

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Apr 24, 2010 6:19 AM in response to chrisbarron

Back to the bad old days of Macs and PCs not playing together.

Hopefully someday PC's will also routinely conform to the the agreed international standards that say symbols should be put at their own codepoints instead of those which everyone expects to be used for Latin characters -- at least if you want to be sure someone else can read your text as you intended.

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