Because we needed to share ideas over a medium where images depictions coded in BMP, JPG or GIF were probably slow and by setting a set of "most probable images" and mapping them to a letter we can always perform the transmission using old loved ASCII to concepts... precached on your HDD in every windows install....
That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article? Physical printing-press typefaces have always contained all sorts of symbols, or "dingbats". So it's completely natural to add these to a font. Especially as you want your symbols to be represented just like any other glyph: using vectors, not bitmaps, and with the ability to use hinting.
Modern fonts now include their own dingbats, as the limit of 256 characters has long since been lifted. So there's no need for a separate font like windings.
That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article?
From the Article:
Today it's easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be a lot harder. There were few ways to get images, files were way too large for puny hard drives, and they were of poor quality. Even worse, it was tough to get pictures to play nicely with text. Fonts like Wingdings provided a workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that didn't clog up their hard drives.
Every week I receive emails with random letter J's inserted in the text. Took me a while to realise that Outlook is auto-converting them to the Wingdings smiley which corresponds to J in other fonts. The problem is that none of the email clients I use renders it correctly.
Yeah, so that's wrong and the article corrects itself later on. Fonts are scalable because they need to be displayed and printed at any size, not because they'd take up space. Even with limitless space today we do not store fonts as bitmaps for this very reason.
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Because we needed to share ideas over a medium where images depictions coded in BMP, JPG or GIF were probably slow and by setting a set of "most probable images" and mapping them to a letter we can always perform the transmission using old loved ASCII to concepts... precached on your HDD in every windows install....
Did the penguin had it?
That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article? Physical printing-press typefaces have always contained all sorts of symbols, or "dingbats". So it's completely natural to add these to a font. Especially as you want your symbols to be represented just like any other glyph: using vectors, not bitmaps, and with the ability to use hinting.
Modern fonts now include their own dingbats, as the limit of 256 characters has long since been lifted. So there's no need for a separate font like windings.
From the Article:
Every week I receive emails with random letter J's inserted in the text. Took me a while to realise that Outlook is auto-converting them to the Wingdings smiley which corresponds to J in other fonts. The problem is that none of the email clients I use renders it correctly.
Yeah, so that's wrong and the article corrects itself later on. Fonts are scalable because they need to be displayed and printed at any size, not because they'd take up space. Even with limitless space today we do not store fonts as bitmaps for this very reason.