Good Dingbat-style font on Adobe Cloud?

[Jennifer@fwm]

Our company is slowly but surely moving towards using only Adobe Cloud fonts in our work flow. One of our new team members is having trouble with our (very old, very over-copied) versions of Zapf Dingbats and Wingdings. Are there equivilents to the Zapf Dingbat or Wingding fonts on the Cloud? 

[Dov Isaacs]

Moved to Adobe Fonts community since this isn't a general Type & Typography question.

[LinSims]

Look for fonts with unicode support. Any font supporting the unicode range U+2700 – U+27BF has dingbats built-in. Source Sans is one, and there are probably others.

Be aware that if you are using fonts produced by font foundaries other than Adobe, the font foundary may remove their fonts from Adobe Fonts. This happened with 2 or 3 foundaries back in May, and it has caused a lot of upset. For any font you want to use, particularly for branding purposes, you might want to look into getting a license from the owning foundary.

[tnixdorf@glacier]

Wow, I'm reading the replies and find them of little help. Did you ever find a simple answer or solutions? I'm in a similar boat. We have switched to mostly cloud fonts but can't figure out a font that is the equivalent to Zapf Dinbats. We are not interested in buying more fonts on top of our cloud account as I'm sure you aren't either. Let me know of any solutions you found. Thanks.

[LinSims]

He's not updating the site anymore, but Alan Wood's Unicode Resources page can probably help you find a font that supports the characters you're looking for. Most or all of the Zapf Dingbats characters have been incorporated into modern fonts with Unicode support.

ETA: And this page lists several fonts that incorporate the symbols from the Zapf Dingbats set:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/dingbats.html

[brittp63]

I am looking for the same answers. Since Adobe is cutting me off in 2023 from using basically a font collection I have assembled over the last 25 years, I have started turning some of my Type 1 Postscript fonts into .ttf format. Excruciatingly painful and time consuming. Even with the super helpful TransType 4 app. I have actually used Fontawesome for many years inside the Adobe Products. Nice icons everyone knows for email, phone, address pins etc. As a font, for both print and web. Not having to insert a bloody picture into my copy. What can you do for me, Adobe? 

[HARSHIKA_VERMA]

Hi there,

We understand your concern. Unfortunately the Adobe Fonts library doesn’t offer a symbol font that would be a good replacement for Zapf Dingbats at this time. I’ve let our library team know that this would be valuable to you and shared your feedback.

We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks,

Harshika

[hasaplan]

Symbol fonts on Creative Cloud...Yes, please! 

[Karen246028390wco]

Please don't take things away without offering an alternative. We need something to replace Dingbats!

[Joel21997691debm]

I would like a good way to search for ornaments/dingbats. There are no filters to help.

[tnixdorf@glacier]

If you look at the top comment Lin Sims writes, "Look for fonts with unicode support. Any font supporting the unicode range U+2700 – U+27BF has dingbats built-in. Source Sans is one, and there are probably others."

Then lower down he gives a link to unicode numbers for those dignbats for that font. This works for PC users, I don't know if it will work for Macs. Unicode are little number codes that turn into a dingbat ounce they are typed in quickly. Long story short, Adobe does not seem to be adding a dingbat font anytime soon. Some classic dingbats are availabel as clip art in Adobestock images.

[LinSims]

There's a page with links to information on MacOS Unicode fonts, too. 🙂

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_macosx.html

ETA: also check to see if your current fonts have a symbol variant. On Windows, at least, font families include variants for italics or bold or small caps or similar. MacOS may be the same (but I don't work on Macs, so I don't know for certain).

(And I'm she, not he. 😉 )

[brittp63]

Hello!!!

Yes, I had come across this site as well. It’s a labour of love and an excellent resource.

But it’s really not as convenient as simply picking Zapf Dingbat (or any bat for that matter) from the character dropdown.

Britt (also a she 😀)

[LinSims]

Oh, I'll grant you that. No idea what to suggest, though. I'm not a designer, I'm a technical writer, and all my fonts are installed locally.

Have you tried Segoe UI Symbol? I believe it's strictly dingbat/wingding type glyphs.

Or if something like Babel Fonts is available on the Mac, you can set the Unicode Block to show the Dingbat code block, which I think includes the Wingdings too. Then you can just copy and paste.

[MAStephens]

Ok se here we are a year later, any news re a decent symbol font? I have a huge library of documents that I add a few paragraphs to every year. I've used square bullets and they are everywhere, what's the best way to proceed?

[tnixdorf@glacier]

As far as I know, there are still no "dingbat" fonts available.

However, if your documents are in InDesign you can replace missing dingbats or bullets from the glyphs palette, under the "Type" menu. The square bullet is not available for every typeface but is definitely in Minion Pro. Regular. 
Failing that you can google square bullet and copy and paste it, doesn't always work for all fonts so you may have to change the typeface for that particular character.
See screen shot:

[MAStephens]

Oh wow thanks so much - I really couln't imagine this showing up in any font's glyphs!

[tnixdorf@glacier]

It varies from font to font. I'm not sure why. You would think it would be a glyph in any sans-serif font but that's not the case. The fact that it's in a serif font seems a bit backward but the whole thing is whacky. Not sure what the staff at Adobe is thinking in regard to this issue.

[MAStephens]

Yeah, I get that things change but the way the whole thing's been handled is a pretty big fail - all warnings and no solutions. The person in charge of Typography at Adobe should be strongly encouraged to move on.

[tnixdorf@glacier]

yes, I can't understand why having a "dingbat" font is such a "no-go". For such a huge and profitable corporation it's baffling how this has transpired. But from the company that thought that I needed a mask automatically attached to every clipping path I make in Photoshop, it's almost not a surprise. Actually, every time I get prompted to evaluate Adobe products and add a suggestion I will mention Dingbats for the rest of my life, haha.

[AdrianneKihm]

This is causing me a lot of problems with my clients. I can not believe we are dealing with this!!!

[Jake Giltsoff]

Hi folks, you can find some symbol/ornamental fonts on Adobe Fonts here https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts?tag=ornaments 

[Matt Tierney]

I just went through the frustrating experience of trying to find a suitable dingbat font in Adobe Cloud to replace Zapf Dingbats or Webdings, Wingdings etc, because I just need a solid circle to use as an end bullet and dont' want to use option-8 and enlarge and baseline shift the heck out of it... After all that, it turns out the text font I'm using (Freight Text Pro) actually has a character that's perfect, buried down in the glyphs. Along with a lot of other usefuls sybols and dingbats. If you're using a good text font with lots of character options, make sure you check your glyphs menu and use "show entire font" to see if you might have something in there. OR, activate Freight Text Pro and use the solid circle in there.

[JJones]

Adobe has really crippled many of its users by not providing a viable alternative to one of the most widely used fonts. Zapf Dingbats appears EVERYWHERE in many of the forms I designed about 20 years ago and are still in use. Now, the lack of support for that font cripples the accesibility for those forms since PDF can't read them. With accessibility broken, the forms are no longer usable by screen readers. This is totally shocking and speaked to Adobe's continued disregard for its professional users. Is it any wonder that its market share continues to dwindle? 

[Bobby Henderson]

Adobe does not own the rights to Zapf Dingbats. That symbol typeface was originally released by ITC. Monotype acquired ITC back in 2000. Monotype has acquired many other type companies since then. Monotype also has their own subscription fonts service, which could be seen as a rival to Adobe Fonts.

A long time ago it was possible to get ITC Zapf Dingbats included with Adobe software. It was in the 220 fonts collection that came with Adobe PageMaker in the 1990's. Old versions of CorelDRAW had Zapf Dingbats along with a decent number of other ITC and Letraset typefaces. Apple still includes Zapf Dingbats in its system fonts for Mac OSX and iPadOS.

Regarding Adobe's "dwindling market share," what is that based on? In terms of mainstream graphics applications Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are still titans. I work in the sign industry and while CorelDRAW still has a decent foothold Adobe's applications are very dominant for generating graphics for large format printing. After Effects is great for creating motion graphics for LED-based variable message displays. IMHO, video authoring and web development are the only areas where Adobe is seeing credible threats from rivals.

Adobe's stock price took a beating in 2022, but it has recovered most of those losses since then.