(v3.1.5.1) I selected the check mark in Wingdings, and though the inserted character seems to be Wingdings (and I manually reapplied the font) it’s definitely not the right character.
“Double-clicking” the character in the map before pasting as suggested here didn’t affect the outcome for me.
How might I resolve this?
NB I also noticed that when I managed to get a check-mark from Wingdings-2, I could not control the font of succeeding text: I had to force “no style” on the paragraph and carefully paste back the single character check marks in the places that became “P” of the default Calibri. Strange. (Speculation: unicode…, extra byte multiplicity?)
Instead of clicking No Style (which sets the whole paragraph back to default) after you’ve entered your Wingding, just go to the format bar and set the font back to Calibri.
It’s the same on the Mac when I enter Chinese into my text. If I don’t reset the font, it continues to use the (very ugly) Roman character set in the Chinese font.
For the very few occasions when I wanted to use a symbol like that, rather than messing around with a character that is dependent on the font and all the potential issues it involves, I took a screenshot of it and just pasted it in as an image.
I guess it depends on the purpose of it.
Wherever I used such symbols, it was just for my own eyes. Not intended to be part of the published manuscript. (Meaning that I didn’t care if the trim or the size of the image wasn’t absolutely perfect.)
. . . . . . . . . .
Else : most of Babel’s symbols work across different fonts. (That’s what I now use instead of Windows’ extremely limited character map.)
That part at any rate has to do with how old school Wingdings is. This was how symbols were done before Unicode became a thing. How it works is by taking normal letters, numbers and punctuation and rendering them as symbols instead. So if you reset the font on a Wingding symbol, you get “P” or whatever the actual character code is. That’s also why there is a “1” and “2” font: the 256 character limit.
With one or two exceptions I’m aware of, all of Wingdings 1 & 2 are in Unicode, and then some, so as recommended above, I suggest using the modern method, even though you will probably need to use a broader Unicode font to use just any check mark you want, but some checks are better than others in terms of how many fonts have glyphs for them.
The point is that, if you insert a character from a different font, whether it be Windings, Webdings, Chinese, Japanese or whatever, the editor will not automatically revert to the default font for that paragraph. You have to reset the font from the Format bar. And I think that is what should be. If you insert a Wingding, you’re probably only going to insert one, but if I had to reset it to Chinese for every character I type, that would be incredibly frustrating!
That said, I don’t know if and therefore how it’s possible in Windows, but on the Mac, when you bring up the emoji and symbol dialog, if you choose a glyph like the tick mark, you can scroll through all the fonts on your machine that have a glyph for that code-point; if you’re using a pretty standard one (I don’t know about Calibri) it will include a glyph.
✓ 