Zapf Dingbats on newer Mac computers

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harryspier123
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Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2017 2:28 pm

Zapf Dingbats on newer Mac computers

Post by harryspier123 »

Dear list members,

I have a large number of Word documents that use characters from Zapf Dingbats. Those characters display correctly on Mac OS X and on Windows but the characters don't display correctly in Word documents on Mac OS High Sierra . A user sent me the zapf Dingbats font from his Mac with High Sierra and the code points in that Zapf Dingbats font are completely different from the Zapf Dingbats font on Windows and on Mac OS X.

The Zapf Dingbats font on Windows and on Mac OS X use the same codepoints in the private use area. But the Zapf Dingbats font on Mac OS High Sierra no longer uses codepoints in the private use area. I couldn't find any references on the internet about this issue.

Does anyone know whats going on?
Is this some error on Apples implementation of High Sierra or does this mean that Windows and Apple now use completely different codepoints for Zapf Dingbats?
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Zapf Dingbats on newer Mac computers

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Zapf Dingbats have had their own character set in Unicode for many years:

Ornamental Dingbats

I suspect that only older fonts encode them to the Private Use Area.
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