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Good Dingbat-style font on Adobe Cloud?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
July 30, 2020
5 replies
16614 views

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?

Download install and licensing

meh67

Inspiring

<Run> Rant mode =Start:
Unfortunately Adobes collection of fonts is WOEFULLY inadequate for most print graphic designers. This is really a shame. Adobe built its company around Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and then actually converted all of us old Quark users to Adobe Indesign (and, speaking for myself, I never looked back - it was a good thing) - but this crippling of us with font usage is a slap in the face. Adobe fonts is definitely not what I would consider a professional font suite - and its search function is terrible. If they are going to corner the market, force us into monthly subscriptions how about at least trying to keep up with a professoinal grade product? The programs are useless for graphic designers without corresponding fonts.

For my part, I cannot depend on Adobe Cloud Fonts to do what I need - and no print designer I know can or even tries. There are any number of simple paid Type Managers (I use TypeFace) and load in my original ITC , .otf version of Zapf Dingats, and all the other dingbat type fonts I have collected (and paid heftly for) over the last 20 years. Unfortunately many of my past purchased fonts are NOT .otf so have literally THOUSANDS of dollars of Type1PS fonts I could no longer use, because Adobe "No longer supports" them. For an idea - just one nice font collection: Say Hoeflers Gotham - is around $500 for the set. Thats ONE font. I had HUNDREDS of fonts I purchased. Believe me, I get it - time marches on and Postscript wont work online, etc etc. But being a print designers, I never really cared about that aspect of fonts, my printers since the early 90s wanted Postscript for their RIP, so thats what I bought over and over. I am constantly tasked to do versioning on old archive projects. Reports, Mailers, Fact Sheets, etc. and Im tired of trying to explain to my clients that its not a cheap easy fix to update them (at least not in their original form) because Adobe no longer supported the fonts we have been using for years. My dear fellow frustrated designers - the only solution is to go back to a type management software, load your own fonts (as long as you have the right version that fits into Adobe's box) and wait for Adobe to get their act together and start treating the people that actually built their company with a little more respect.
- Build your online font collection - its like amateur hour there now, I laugh when I go there, and so do all my designer friends. To make sure Im not just over-reacting - I just asked a fellow designer and he said, "You still try to use that? I gave up on that crap awhile ago - are you kidding?"
- Survey PRINT designers about what fonts they need to get their jobs done and do your best to get those added. If you are going to force us to use only specific fonts - help us out, throw us a bone! You may have to pay more than you want to license actual real professionally designed fonts - but we are paying you EVERY MONTH. A lot of your fonts look like the free ones my grade schooler gets to make his history report "fancy."

<Run> Rant mode =Stop:

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

First of all, there are decent font conversion applications, such as TransType 4 by FontLab Ltd that can convert old T1 fonts to OpenType format. It will convert entire folders of fonts at once.
https://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype/

The Adobe Fonts service currently has 3861 type families from over 200 different type companies. There are no other graphics applications from anyone else with type collections that big. CorelDRAW has around 1000 fonts and most of those are the same fonts they've been bundling since the 1990's. Deneba Canvas had 2000 fonts, but most of those were oddly named copy cat fonts from URW. Adobe's Creative Suite releases had hardly any bundled fonts; I don't remember seeing any in the CS5.5 Master Collection retail box discs. In the 1990's releases of Illustrator or PageMaker came with maybe a couple hundred fonts. The Adobe Fonts service is pretty valuable compared to those offerings.

The only other fonts service available on the market that is any bigger or better than Adobe Fonts is Monotype's subscription font service. It's $199 per year for individual users; they say that gives access to 150,000 fonts. Monotype is a pretty massive company in relation to other type foundries; they've bought many rivals (Linotype, Bitstream, ITC, Hoefler and numerous others). Adobe has the rights to originals typefaces it generated in-house. Monotype owns the rights to many well-known typefaces, be it Zapf Dingats, Helvetica and now even Gotham. Adobe can do only so much to convince Monotype to port any of those typeface to Adobe Fonts.

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Monotype "dangerously close to becoming a monopoly"....

... you mean like Adobe?

Listen, I think you are missing my point, and I did get a little side-tracked just because of how this entire thing upsets me. If Adobe is going to no longer support a specific kind of typeface that designers have been using for a long, loooong time. (I graduated college in 1991 and have been using/purchasing fonts for print ever since) They can at least make a way we can use our old fonts without an additional purchase of some third-party software that everything I have seen (and people have commented on above) gets spotty reviews.

If we are going to have to deal with a company that has monopolizing everything else designers need to function - they can step up and give us the benefits of that monopolization. Use their buying power to get licensing on more of the worlds classic fonts (thats not defintion - its type history 101). A lot more robust. If they want us to be locked into them (which we are, we are stuck- I would LOVE some competition for Adobe to kick them off their high horse) , they need to reciprocate.

I don't like it that support of Postscript Type 1 fonts was discontinued in Adobe's applications. I've been doing graphics work for more than 30 years; I have a pretty good collection of old T1 fonts. It sucks to see those files being de-valued.

But the writing is on the wall for the old T1 format. It's only a matter of time before other creative software companies disable T1 support in their applications. I would not be surprised if Microsoft took away the ability to install T1 fonts in Windows in upcoming releases of the OS.

Much of this has to do with Harfbuzz. It is a text shaping engine used by many software applications, web browers and even operating systems like Android and ChromeOS. Postscript Type 1 fonts are not supported by Harfbuzz. Adobe had to drop T1 support in order to incorporate Harfbuzz support into applications like InDesign.

Even if Harfbuzz wasn't a factor the T1 font format is still obsolete. There is no Unicode support in T1 fonts (that's the deal-breaker for Harfbuzz). A Type 1 font is limited to no more than 256 glyphs. That is pathetic compared to modern OpenType fonts.

When I'm considering buying a newly released type family I look at what kinds of extended character sets are included in the font files. The old T1 format required separate font files for things like native small capitals or "expert set" glyphs like ligatures or alternate characters. OpenType gets rid of that nonsense by allowing those extended character ranges to be included in the same font file. And now we have the OTF Variable format where a single font file can function like an entire type family. It resurrected concepts from the Type 1 Multiple Master format but added all the extra capabilities of OpenType. OTF Variable Fonts are already far more successful than the T1 MM format ever was.

As for Adobe being a monopoly, I don't agree with that. Heck, I have four different vector drawing apps installed on my computer: Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Affinity Designer and Inkscape. I've used others like Freehand and Canvas. Adobe's apps are definitely the most popular in professional circles. There are many other applications out there in various price points or even free. Those of us who have to handle a lot of corporate graphics file need to use Adobe's apps in order to open and edit those files accurately. Not enough marketing departments create branding assets are application agnostic. The files are often very Adobe-centric. Someone can import PDF or AI files into CorelDRAW but they could end up wasting lots of time repairing the artwork due to unpredictable things that happen when opening the art in a non-native environment.

M

Matt Tierney

New Participant

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.

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JJones

Inspiring

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?

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

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.

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tnixdorf@glacier

Participating Frequently

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

Community Expert

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

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brittp63

New Participant

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?

LinSims

Community Expert

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.

Dov Isaacs

Brainiac

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

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

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