Imagine you’re designing a web page for some intranet or personal use, where you know that the Wingdings font will be available, and you want to use That Fancy Wingdings Character for, say, some list bullets or as an icon on a button. But alas! You can’t get Firefox to render it, and all you get is plain text characters instead.

Now Internet legend has it that the current version of Firefox cannot render Wingdings or similar fonts. No chance,  try as you might. You can just as well give up.

Well, this legend is wrong.

Yes, it is true that Firefox does not support mapping of 8-bit characters to properly designed symbol fonts, so you can’t simply pick your Wingdings icon of choice from the Windows character map, paste the corresponding ASCII- or Latin-1 character into HTML, apply the “font-family: Wingdings;” style and expect it to work.

Truth, however, is also that Wingings (and likewise Wingdings 2 and 3 as well as Webdings) provide an alternate, Unicode-conformant mapping - to all glyphs.

Yes, that’s right: Unicode defines code points for each and every Wingdings, Wingdings 2 and 3, and Webdings glyph. Well, sort of. Actually it defines code points for a bunch of private use glyphs, which can be just about anything (or nothing), depending on the font employed.

The private use area of the base multilingual plane (the 16-bit part of Unicode) begins at U+E000, and continues up to U+F7FF, which is more than the Wingdings font needs. All the ‘dings use the subrange U+F021 to U+F0FF to map their entire set of glyphs into the Unicode world. Once you know the 8-bit code of the character (e.g. from the Windows character map), you can determine the Unicode codepoint by simply adding U+F000. For instance, the Wingdings open hand (8-bit code 0×49 = “O”) would be U+F049, which you can enter in HTML as &#F049; or in CSS as “\F049″.

There. Now you know.