How to Use Webdings
By Sara Williams
Webdings is a font released by Microsoft for use with Internet Explorer 4 and above. The font came out in 1997 and included many Web symbols recommended by people in the industry as well as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, the use of Webdings is somewhat limited, because it is a Windows font not included with every computer system. Microsoft suggests using the font for Web pages on a Windows-based local intranet, such as those used at business offices.
Click on "Start" on the Windows taskbar and type "Character Map" into the search bar. Press the "Enter" key to open the Character Map application. Click on the down-arrow icon on the top drop-down box and select "Webdings" as your font. Click on any Webding character to enlarge its preview.
Copy any character in this font set by first clicking on the character and then clicking the "Select" button. You can copy multiple characters at one time, so select as many Webdings as you wish. When ready to copy them, click the "Copy" button. This places your selected characters on the clipboard and makes them available for pasting into other programs. Open up the program you wish to paste the Webding into, such as Word, and press "Ctrl" and "V" on your keyboard. To paste into a graphics program, make sure you created a text box or started the text tool first.
Set a "span" tag to use Webdings font and put it around text you wish to transform into a Webding character. To do this, within the "span" tag, add "font-family:webdings" to the "style" attribute. Rather than selecting a letter or symbol on your keyboard that is associated with the Webding character, type in its character code with the prefix "&#" and add a semicolon to the end. For example, the spider's code is "0x21" but is typed as "�x21;" in an HTML document. To find the code for a character, click on the character in the Character Map application and hover over it to read the code.
References
Warnings
- Users of operating systems other than Windows will see garbled text instead of the Webding if you attempt to use Webdings on a regular website.
Writer Bio
Sara Williams lives in western New York, where she is a freelance Web designer and content writer. She specializes in Web design, development and computer-hardware topics. Williams holds an Associate of Applied Science in computer information systems.