Zapf Dingbats not working in Pages

This statement is not true. You can change font via the font menu to Zapf Dingbats in MS Word and type all day long in that font style. Apple Pages does not support this functionality.

This is also true of any Japanese character fonts which I often use as well.　アsセエんヘレ：）<- which is literally as seen here, just in a katakana font.

Just because Pages doesn't support an feature, doesn't mean it was the correct implementation of that feature. Remember, users just want to work.. not figure it out. And in this instance, MS has it right.

When I select text or try typing in new text in the Zapf Dingbat font it appears as a sans serif font (Helvetica maybe?).

In modern Unicode systems you cannot type Dingbats, as they are no longer mapped to Latin but have their own codepoints. Thus you have to use a Character Viewer or similar utility. The iPad does not have one, but you can copy/paste from another document or use an app like Unicode Table. Dingbats are in Unicode range 2700.

You can change font via the font menu to Zapf Dingbats in MS Word and type all day long in that font style.

When you do that, I don't think you are producing dingbats. The underlying code is for Latin letters. There is no guarantee that anyone is going to see your dingbats. Try typing them here, nobody will see them. Mapping dingbats to Latin is obsolete technology which Word is keeping alive, probably for backwards compatibility reasons.

This is also true of any Japanese character fonts which I often use as well.　アsセエんヘレ：）<- which is literally as seen here, just in a katakana font.</div>

That is unicode japanese. Can you really type it with your keyboard set to English, without switching to the Japanese IM?

Tom Gewecke wrote:

You can change font via the font menu to Zapf Dingbats in MS Word and type all day long in that font style.

When you do that, I don't think you are producing dingbats. The underlying code is for Latin letters. There is no guarantee that anyone is going to see your dingbats. Try typing them here, nobody will see them. Mapping dingbats to Latin is obsolete technology which Word is keeping alive, probably for backwards compatibility reasons.

Word is, as so often, unpredictable.

Type with a Dingbats font and save as .doc. The resulting file displays fine in TextEdit and Pages. It looks idiotic in OpenOffice.

Type with a Dingbats font and save as .docx. The resulting file displays fine in Pages. It looks idiotic in OpenOffice and TextEdit.

Paste the real Unicode Dingbats characters (like ✴❈❉▲ ❉▲ ❚❁❐❆ ❄❉■❇❂❁▼▲✎) in Word and the file appears fine in all applications I have tried with.

Word is, as so often, unpredictable.

Interesting! If you type in word with a dingbats font and don't save, will it copy/paste dingbats or latin into other apps (or this forum)?

PS Have you ever heard of someone using Japanese kana fonts mapped to Latin?

Tom Gewecke wrote:

Word is, as so often, unpredictable.

Interesting! If you type in word with a dingbats font and don't save, will it copy/paste dingbats or latin into other apps (or this forum)?

Yes, it works reasonably fine:
✴❈❉▲ ❉▲ ❍❙ ▼❅❘▼✎

I think we had a similar discussion in the past, but about Symbol and Greek letters. MS Word is reasonably aware of the unicode values, but sometimes it gets them wrong when they are typed. The behaviour was too inconsistent for me to sort out fully, so I gave up, if I remember well.

PS Have you ever heard of someone using Japanese kana fonts mapped to Latin?

No, never. One could guess that the previous poster mixes kana fonts with the Japanese input style "kana input" (instead of "romaji input") where each key is mapped to one kana. To type にほん, one types the five keys "n i h o n" with romaji input but just the three keys "i - y" with kana input.

Still, it would surprise me if there have not been "Latin" kana fonts around in the past.