I have an existing Symbol font works ok for me. Since I want to create an Embedding font, I have decided to create an unicode font. Since the effort for converting Symbol Font to a Unicode font failed, I created a new unicode fond and cut and paste all the characters from the symbol fond and pasted it to the newly created font. Once I installled the font, I found many characters missing and found that it is due to the wrong mapping for those character.
For example, in my symbol font for the character “PRODUCT” the mapping is $F0B8.
But for the unicode font the mapping (Though I copied all the fonts from the symbol font) is $220F. Also I couln’t map the character “PRODUCT” to $F0B8 in my unicode font. Could some one please tell me what is going wroung?
Did you carefully follow the instructions in the online manual on converting Symbol fonts to Unicode?
I just tried it with Wingdings. I got a warning that some mappings might be lost, but continued anyway. In the event, the mapping of one glyph was lost, so I remapped it to “broken bar” which was unused. I left the Panose setting as Pictorial as that seemed most appropriate for the Wingdings font, but otherwise I followed the instructions.
I renamed the font as “Wingdings Unicode” and installed it.
The font seems to work just fine and all of the characters can be typed by using the keyboard or an ANSI code like Alter 223 to access the characters in the higher ANSI range.
As far as I know, the mapping $F0B8 is only appropriate for Symbol fonts. Use any other mapping that suits your purposes, e.g. you could map “Product” to “P” (80)
I didn’t have the chance to come here and thank you for eerything you did to me, very helpful and I am trying really hard now. I sent you 2 e-mails thanking you and now I am here to thank you again, in case you didn’t receive those.
Thank you so much for your input and I really appreciate it.. In fact I have followed the tutorial (From the help) and got the same result.
I have a web site where I have lot of documents in the symbol font. Now I need to go throgh those documents and find those charactes and replace with the new mapped value and use the enboded font. I can automate it using a program, but you think is there any other neat way of doing it?
I don’t think converting a Symbol font to a Unicode font is wise, unless there is no other way of embedding the font. Have you tried embedding the symbol font? AFAIK Word 2003 SP2 supports this.
Thank you so much for your input and I got a break through on this issue.
When I used my old font to create the embedded font using Microsoft WEFT, my font used to list in not supported category for embedding.
Now I created a new symbol font using FontCreator 5.5 and copied all the characters from my old font to the new font. Magically everything started working. The new symbol fond in WEFT tool shows Editable and I was able to create an embedded symbol font. And there is no font mapping issues!!! Great.
But now I have a question is there any known problems with the Symbol embedded font? I heard some people saying that Unicode embedded font is superior to Symbol Embedded font.
For me to convert the existing files in the symbol characters to the Unicode character is a one time effort and I think that is not tough task. But if there is no issues with Symbol Embedded font in cross browsers, why should I do that. Can any one give more thought on this?
A couple of years ago I noticed problems with embedded symbol fonts, as mentioned in this post and in the documentation. But with Word 2003 I no longer see this problem.