ITC Zapf Dingbats is one of the more common

dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, (similar to box-drawing characters) or as ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

s. It was designed by the

typographer Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), a ...

Hermann Zapf Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include ...

in 1978 and licensed by

International Typeface Corporation The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler. The company was one of the world's first type foundries to have no history in the production of ...

History

In 1977, Zapf created about 1000 (or over 1200 according to Linotype) sketches of signs and symbols. ITC chose from those a subset of 360 symbols, ornaments and typographic elements based on the original designs, which became known as ITC Zapf Dingbats. The font first gained wide distribution when ITC Zapf Dingbats, which consists of the subset chosen by ITC, became one of 35 PostScript fonts built into Apple's

LaserWriter Plus The LaserWriter is a laser printer with built-in PostScript interpreter sold by Apple Inc., Apple, Inc. from 1985 to 1988. It was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. In combination with WYSIWYG publishing software like ...

. When ITC Zapf Dingbats was first announced in ''U&lc'' magazine, volume 5-2, the family was divided into the 100 series (ITC-100), 200 series (ITC-200), 300 series (ITC-300). Each series contains 120 symbols. Zapf Dingbats series 100 became widely implemented on

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...

printers, and gained currency as a

pi font In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, (similar to box-drawing characters) or as ...

encoding in the 1980s and early 1990s. It incorporates several rightward-facing arrows without counterparts for the other three cardinal directions, on the assumption that it would be used in contexts allowing rotation of text characters.

Availability

The ITC glyph set is included in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

and it is one of the "Basic 14" typefaces guaranteed to be available for

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

files. ZapfDingbats, the

version of ITC Zapf Dingbats, is distributed with Acrobat Reader 5 and 5.1.

URW++ URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the d ...

donated a version of ZapfDingbats to

GhostScript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language file ...

under the non-commercial

Aladdin Free Public License The Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter. History The license was derived from the GNU General Public License, but differs on two key points ...

. The font can be found in GhostPCL source code, as ''D050000L.ttf''. ITC Zapf Dingbats Std is an OpenType version of the font family, based on the PostScript variant of the font. The

glyphs A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

are mapped to the corresponding Unicode code points. The family consists of 1 font (ITC Zapf Dingbats Medium) with 204 glyphs.

Zapf Essentials

Zapf Essentials is an update to the Zapf Dingbats family which consists of 6 symbol-encoded fonts categorized in Arrows One (black arrows), Arrows Two (white arrows, patterned arrows), Communication (pointing fingers, communication devices), Markers (squares, triangles, circles, ticks, hearts, crosses, check marks, leaves), Office (pen, clock, currency, scissors, hand), Ornaments (flowers, stars), for a total of 372 glyphs. However, not all ITC Zapf Dingbats glyphs are included in the Zapf Essentials collections (e.g.: airplane, letter).A dynamic, versatile symbol font by Hermann Zapf
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Codepage layout

Usages

David Carson, radical editor of experimental music magazine '' Ray Gun'', lent the font a degree of notoriety in 1994 when he printed an interview with

Bryan Ferry Bryan Ferry CBE (born 26 September 1945) is an English singer and songwriter. His voice has been described as an "elegant, seductive croon". He also established a distinctive image and sartorial style: according to ''The Independent'', Ferry an ...

in the magazine entirely in the symbols-only font – the double-page spread was therefore incomprehensible and would have to be interpreted like a cryptogram for those unfamiliar with the font. He said he did it because the interview was "incredibly boring" and that upon searching his typeface collection for a suitable font and ending at Zapf Dingbats, decided to use it with hopes of making the article interesting again.Helvetica
2007 film by

Gary Hustwit Gary Hustwit is an American independent filmmaker and photographer. He is best known for his design documentaries, which examine the impact of trends in graphic design, typography, industrial design, architecture, and urban planning. He told '' ...

References

External links

ITC Zapf Dingbats Font Family - by Hermann ZapfZapf Dingbats to Unicode mapping
- provided to the Unicode Consortium by Apple.
Official Unicode Dingbats block code chart
(contains the Zapf Dingbats characters, except those that had already been present in Unicode) - Unicode.org, PDF format {{MacOS typefaces International Typeface Corporation typefaces Symbol typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1978 Typefaces designed by Hermann Zapf