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.
Comments
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.