Quote:
Originally Posted by Stewart Black
On my current ePub formatting job, I needed "checkboxes" on a set of pages. [...] I duly incorporated Wingding.ttf in the Fonts, [...] However, when I tried the Nook reader, the checkboxes do NOT show, only an indication of an unrecognized character. Any ideas what I missed or how to fix this?
I appreciate any help or insights anyone may have. Thank you.
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Wingdings is not a Unicode font, so the characters are all jumbled up.
For example, if you typed the letter "a" in:
- Symbol = α = Lowercase alpha
- Webdings = ✔ = Heavy Check Mark
- Wingdings = ♋ = Cancer
- Wingdings 2 = 🙦 = Heavy North East Pointing Bud
- Wingdings 3 = ➩ = Right-Shaded White Rightwards Arrow
Visually, it might
look like a '✔' (heavy checkmark) or '♋' (Cancer symbol)—but underneath, it's actually an 'a'.
This would completely mess up things like Text-to-Speech! Or if the user reading the ebook decided to change their font!
Instead, for any of those symbols you want to use, you should be using the proper Unicode characters.
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Side Note: In 2014, all Symbol/Webdings/Wingdings characters were added into Unicode.
In 2018, Kovid added a feature to Calibre. If Calibre detects a document is using any of those 5 non-Unicode fonts, it will auto-convert the characters to their Unicode equivalents.
There is now no excuse to ever use those ancient Symbol/Webdings/Wingdings fonts!
- - -
Side Note #2: In order to find the proper Unicode symbols, I highly recommend using these sites, which collect them in tables:
If you want a checkbox, then use:
- ☐ = U+2610 = BALLOT BOX
- ☑ = U+2611 = BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK
- ☒ = U+2612 = BALLOT BOX WITH X
- ✓ = U+2713 = CHECK MARK
- ✗ = U+2717 = BALLOT X
Like Doitsu said, to use this in your ebook, you would then need to embed a font that includes these symbols.
Personally, I use the "Symbola" font, but there are plenty of others out there too.
Side Note #2.1: If you want even more info on how to find/insert these obscure characters, also see my posts in:
where I described:
- Sigil's Insert > Special Character + Calibre's Edit > Insert Special Character...
- Word/LibreOffice's "Insert Special Character".
- Emoji or rare characters, like 🌔 (WAXING GIBBOUS MOON) or 🜊 (ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR VINEGAR)
- Tools for finding out which fonts on your system include a given character/symbol.
If you want a step-by-step tutorial on how to embed (and subset) a font, then see my post in:
I described how to mark a handful of characters using HTML+CSS, then embed and use a font only for those few characters. (Perfect for something like a checkbox or Japanese which is only used in a very small part of the ebook!)