[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

At the moment the font's are ignored, so I am not surprised by this. Although, there is a setting in which the used fonts are referenced and, if possible, embedded in the ePUB. It should do the trick I think. That being said, embedding is usually not allowed for most commercial fonts, that would include webdings.

In the case of Webdings/Wingdings, they are non-Unicode fonts. They remap the characters -> completely different symbols. You wouldn't want to embed that garbage into an EPUB anyway (think of all the Text-to-Speech disasters it would cause)!

Also, it seems like Unicode already did all the hard work by absorbing those 4 dingbat fonts completely.

Side Note: From what I could tell, the guy who created Symbola released it for anyone to use for any use. Straight from his site:

"In lieu of a licence; fonts and documents in this site are free for any use".

According to fileformat.info, it is one of the very few fonts that actually has a bunch of the more obscure symbols like:

No Piracy: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...f572/index.htm
Right Speech Bubble: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...f5e9/index.htm
Capitulum: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...2e3f/index.htm

Side Note #2: Here is the topic that spawned this discussion, "Problem with inline image":

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=278187

eggheadbooks1 was working on a book with a Musical Note in Webdings:

• Normal Text
  
  • ¯
• Webdings
  
  • Beamed Eighth Notes: ♫

I was just saying to use the UTF-8 and embed a font, which lead me down this whole researching rabbit hole.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

One of the issues is that the support for these characters in the default fonts on the readers are probably non-existing. So the references would be there, but rendered as a question mark or box usually.

I would still say this would be better than the current "abc", or some sort of image embedding... and Unicode support is only going to go up from here.

I suspect more common symbols like:

Lock: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...F512/index.htm
Open Lock: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...F513/index.htm

are going to be added into fonts in phones, and that stuff will propagate into usage elsewhere. Next thing you know, all those new amazing Unicode smilies are going to be creeping into books too! Might as well stay ahead of the curve!