wingdings

User Help for Mozilla Firefox
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cruzer
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wingdings

Post by cruzer »

I belong to a message board where several of the members regularly use wingdings in their messages. I'm unable to view them if Firefox. I found a website http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/firefox/firefox.htm that explains how to "fix" this issue. Below is the content regarding wingdings:

Webdings and wingdings Fonts can be made available in Firefox. (#wingdings)
¥ z Q

Any changes that you make to the fonts, apply only to your own system, the main purpose here is so that you can see pages the same in Firefox as seen in Internet Explorer. I did include a barcode font described on my Mail Merge page (Excel & MS Word) just to show that any fonts you added to your Windows system can also be made available in Firefox.
Writing your own HTML then you should be using HTML escapes or Unicode characters, though you may not find a substitute for everything even in Unicode. For more information on symbols used in HTML see my Symbols page.

I just wanted to be able to include some symbols regardless of the browser. On my search page are some symbols at the top which are fine in Internet Explorer but no good in Firefox. I have included some JavaScript on the search page to spell out some of the material that would otherwise be completely ambiguous. Can't use UDF-8 either for the webpage because that would mess up Internet Explorer. An attempt to use images proved unwieldy. Found the solution though in adding the fonts to Firefox as follows:

This customization, if wanted, usually has to be redone after each upgrade to Firefox. [Windows fonts]

To Make Webdings and Wingdings available ♦ make the following changes:
#-- Free 3 of 9 barcode available from Matthew Welch http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/
#-- fixing by hand -- Enabling Symbol font for Mozilla on Windows
#-- http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/Wfonts.html
#-- file:///c:/program files/Mozilla Firefox/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties
# Symbol font
#encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
encoding.free3of9.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings2.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings3.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.webdings.ttf = windows-1252


#For the changes above, use an editor (HTML-Kit) that will not make it CRLF, must be LF -- Do Not Use NOTEPAD.
#-- for Mozilla file is file:///c:/program files/Mozilla/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties
#-- for Firefox portable file is #-- file:///F:/FirefoxPortable/App/firefox/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties

Once completed you should be able to see: symbol(D delta), webdings(‡ skier‡), wingdings(( black phone, ♦ star, ¥ target, z point of interest, Q airplane), wingdings 2(' white phone, R check mark in a box, ù 3 stars), and wingdings 3(_ arrow) in Mozilla just like you; would see in Internet Explorer. If those are correct you should be able to see this Font Table on your PC system exactly as it appears in IE on your PC system.

‡ In the example above the double dagger(‡) symbol ‡ has been substituted for Windows ‡ and still shows a skier in a successfully implemented webdings font.

Windows characters 130-159 (x'80'-x'8F') are considered invalid by W3C standards, though widely recognized and in use from the 1980's and now registered as the windows-1252 code page (Win-Latin1) at IANA [ref, ref.] and are described in The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup document.

Short test for superscript/subscript, okay in firefox where x<sup>n<sub>i</sub></sup> renders correction as xni, but IE6 displays as if it was x<sup>n</sub>i</sub></sup> (xni). [Ref]


I ran the Wfontfix and get the following error message every time: Can't Find Mozilla.lnk file. Specify On Command Line. Usage: Wfontfix [Filename]

I have no idea how to do this manually as I'm not that technologically savvy. Can anyone offer help as it's rather annoying to not be able to view wingdings in the posts on my board.

TIA!
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dickvl
Posts: 54139
Joined: July 18th, 2005, 3:25 am

Post by dickvl »

I tried it and it worked for me.
The file is: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res\fonts\fontEncoding.properties
Make a backup copy of the file before making any changes.

I added this code at the bottom:

Code: Select all

encoding.free3of9.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings2.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings3.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.webdings.ttf = windows-1252
Put a # to comment out the line 57:
[56] # Symbol font
[57] #encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding

You need to use an editor that can preserve the Unix line breaks (LF instead of CR/LF).
You can use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad2
http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

What I did was to replace the CR/LF with the (invisible) LF symbols by using a copy/paste in Notepad.
So it can be done with Notepad.
cruzer
Guest

Post by cruzer »

The problem is that's all Greek to me...I have no idea how to even begin that process. I know where to find Mozilla in the program files and that's about it.

I thought clicking on that link and running that program was supposed to do it, but I only get an error message and wingdings still don't show up.

This sucks. :(
User avatar
dickvl
Posts: 54139
Joined: July 18th, 2005, 3:25 am

Post by dickvl »

Did you download the Notepad2 editor?
It is a zip archive that you can open in Windows Explorer and then copy the files to another folder outside that archive.

Then you can start the Notepad2.exe file and use "File > Open".
Browse to the "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res\fonts\" folder.

Select fontEncoding.properties and click 'Open' to open the file.
Use "File > Save Copy" to make a backup copy of the file (fontEncoding.properties.sav), so you can undo if you make an error.

Go to line [57] #encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
Put a # at the begin like in the above line.

Go to the end of the file and Copy/Paste the extra lines:

Code: Select all

encoding.free3of9.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings2.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.wingdings3.ttf = windows-1252
encoding.webdings.ttf = windows-1252

Save the file: "File > Save"

That should do it and you can start Firefox to see if that works.
cruzer
Guest

Post by cruzer »

It works!

Thank you so much for explaining that to me!!!

:) :) :)
User avatar
dickvl
Posts: 54139
Joined: July 18th, 2005, 3:25 am

Post by dickvl »

You're very welcome and glad that you got it working :)

And thanks for that link: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/firefox/firefox.htm
I had a while back seen another poster with that issue and didn't know about that solution for Firefox 2.
(http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=581155)

Btw: Firefox 3 (Minefield/GranParadiso) doesn't need that patch anymore.
cruzer
Guest

Post by cruzer »

You're welcome for the link, even though I didn't know I was providing you with something you needed. :D

I just read the release notes on Firefox 3 and I think I'll wait until it's past the planning stages. ;)
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dickvl
Posts: 54139
Joined: July 18th, 2005, 3:25 am

Post by dickvl »

That is a wise idea.

If you are curious then you can install it along side of Firefox 2 in a separate folder and use a separate profile.
Shortcut to a Specific Profile (KB)
Starting Firefox or Thunderbird with a specified profile (KB)
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crazyfairy
Posts: 7
Joined: November 15th, 2004, 8:06 pm

Post by crazyfairy »

THANK YOU THANK YOU! I just started having this minor problem and I'm so happy to have found this fix!
Give a little....Get a little....
arna
Guest

Re: wingdings

Post by arna »

Does someone has any idea why this fontEncoding.properties file is not in my rep ? Only mathfont.* files...
No idea how to fix the problem therefore...
User avatar
dickvl
Posts: 54139
Joined: July 18th, 2005, 3:25 am

Re: wingdings

Post by dickvl »

That workaround (fix) doesn't work anymore in Firefox 3.
See e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424610 (do not comment in bug reports)
mikezilla2
Posts: 236
Joined: May 24th, 2008, 11:45 pm

Re: wingdings

Post by mikezilla2 »

no way to make it work eh .....
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