Symbol Fonts

Regular fonts are generally made up of the following:

• The characters of at least one language’s writing system

• Punctuation

• Numerals

For our purposes, a symbol font differs by providing an entirely different set of glyphs as their primary focus. The table below outlines categories relevant to Fontknife users looking to increase iteration speed. Each category will be covered in greater depth further down the page.

Quick Link	Glyphs Provided	How
Dingbat Fonts	Dingbats (various symbols)	May hijack code points
Emoji Fonts	Emoji	Mostly proper code points
Math Fonts	Math operators, arrows, etc	Mostly proper code points
Music fonts	Notes and other glyphs	Mostly proper code points

Dingbat Fonts

A dingbat font provides dingbats instead of the usual glyphs for characters.

Since the Unicode usually adds any widely useful or popular symbols, today’s dingbat fonts each tend to serve a very specific purpose. They can be useful, decorative, or both.

Productive Dingbats

Microsoft’s Wingdings Font Series are the some of the most famous examples of dingbat fonts.

However, the first of the Wingdings fonts is now obsolete. In addition to overlapping with the earlier Zapf Dingbat typeface, the symbols of both fonts were eventually included into the Unicode standard.

To learn more, please see:

• Alan Wood’s overview of Wingdings vs Unicode (Updated in 2018)

• Unicode 7.0’s change log (2014)

Decorative Dingbats

Some dingbat fonts stick closer to the term’s decorative origins.

For example, Teranoptia is a font by Tunera Type Foundry’s Ariel Martin Perez. Visit the font’s page to try their interactive preview. It’s fun!

If you can’t right now, that’s okay. The font allows you to draw imaginary creatures with standard ASCII characters through custom glyphs:

Glyphs	Characters Replaced
Monster body parts	Latin letter characters
Left & right upward burrows	[, ] (Square brackets)
Left & right horizontal burrows	(, ) (Parentheses)
Left & right downward burrows	{, } (Curly braces)

Emoji Fonts

TTF and OTF fonts contain a table which allows a computer to look up glyph data for a given unicode code point.

Since emoji have been part of the unicode standard for years, there are now font files dedicated purely to the task of providing emoji. Fontknife offers decent support for converting emoji fonts into graphics:

• Single-color emoji fonts like Noto Emoji tend to mostly work

• No color font (Google Fonts link) characters are known to work

Simple Emoji

For simple emoji like 😊 (U+1F60A), things are exactly as they seem:

• A single code point represents the character

• A single glyph is chosen based on that code point

Multi-Character Emoji

Many emoji aren’t simple. Instead, they’re composed of multiple code points. Some of these represent unprintable characters whuch can combine in at least two ways.

Tip

It’s okay to be overhelmed by this.

Remember, Text Rendering is Really Hard.

Unicode’s list of recommended ZWJ sequences

Note that these sequences aren’t limited to only two emoji with a single zwj between them. This is why they’re called zero width joiner sequences or zwj sequences. A given zwj sequence can also be the base for another zwj sequence formed by appending to it.

Color Emoji

TL;DR: These won’t be supported for the foreseeable future

There are at least three mutually incompatible ways to describe color data for a specific glyph in a TTF or OTF font:

• The Google Fonts implementation

• Apple’s custom TTF extension

• At least two different approaches by Microsoft

None of these are reliably well-supported by the PIL module which Fontknife uses. This makes offering support for them hard.

Math Fonts

Filler.

Music fonts

Songs and bars.