[XeTeX] Dingbat symbol

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Jan 2006, at 12:14 am, Joachim Trinkwitz wrote:

> I'm testing Xe(La)TeX with one of my existing LaTeX-documents, so  
> far successfully, but one question remains: how can I insert a  
> symbol (actually, the phone symbol) from the Zapf Dingbats font? I  
> used to do this with help of the pifont package, but accessing the  
> Mac OS X system font directly seems more straightforward now ...
>

You need to know the Unicode character code of the symbol you want.  
With some "symbolic" fonts, such as Wingdings and Monotype Sorts, the  
characters are encoded in the Private Use Area at U+Fxxx, but the  
characters in Zapf Dingbats have standard code assignments; you can  
find them in the "Miscellaneous Symbols" and "Dingbats" blocks of  
Unicode, around U+26xx and 27xx.

One way to locate them is to look in the Character Palette available  
through the keyboard (input) menu, if you've turned it on in System  
Prefs / International / Input. You can either view all of Unicode, or  
-- more conveniently, in this case -- you can view the glyphs  
available in a specific font. (View by Glyph, and choose Zapf  
Dingbats.) Click to select the black telephone, and you get a tooltip  
showing you that it is U+260E. (Or there's the "telephone location  
symbol", which is U+2706.)

In XeTeX, you need to load the font, either directly with a \font  
command, e.g.:

	\font\dingbats="Zapf Dingbats" at 12pt

or (if you're dealing with LaTeX) using the fontspec package:

	\newfontinstance\dingbats{Zapf Dingbats}

Then you can print a telephone by saying {\dingbats \char"260E}. Or,  
of course, you can use the Character Palette or the Hex Input  
keyboard to put the actual character in your document (assuming  
you're using UTF-8, not MacRoman or Latin1), and say {\dingbats ☎}.

HTH,

JK