Dingbats
Dingbats refer to ornamental designs (e.g., symbols, glyphs, characters) used in typesetting to decorate text. These have been around as long as printing. The forms we are commonly acquainted with are Wingdings (designed from the Lucida typeface) and Zapf Dingbats, created by Hermann Zapf (Zapfino, Palatino, Optima).Wingdings, a set of Dingbats, were originally created in 1990 by Microsoft to be included in their Windows operating system. Wingdings is a TrueType font and consists of three sets including Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3.
Zapf Dingbats were designed in 1977 from over 1000 sketches of signs and symbols done by Hermann Zapf. The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) chose 360 of those sketches and created the PostScript font set ITC Zapf Dingbats. The set was originally packaged with one of Apple's early printers, the Apple LaserWriter Plus.
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Unicode
Unicode – a computer industry standard for encoding, representing and handling digital text – is the standard for web text, (hopefully) defined in the header of each webpage and typically defined as UTF-8 (again, one would hope). The intent is to present text the same on every machine, every operating system, every browser. It is because of Unicode that some characters copied from Word or other word processing programs do not translate to the web, creating a weird looking character. These can typically be found where an endash, bullet, apostrophe, single- or double-quotes should be.
ASCII
To support characters like those mentioned above that aren't available in Unicode type there is a set is known as ASCII characters. ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is a character encoding system including 128 characters. When you see an ampersand on the web, the person who coded the content most likely referred to it as & to create that character. The ASCII set contains symbols for every letter of the alphabet (upper and lower case), numbers, punctuation (including endash, emdash, bullet, latin letters, copyright, trademark, registered symbols and content mark-up symbols (paragraph tags, etc.), and much more.
Sources
"ASCII - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
Carter, Rob, Philip B. Meggs, and Ben Day. Typographic Design: Form and Communication. 5rd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Print.
"Dingbat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
"Unicode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
"Wingdings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
"Zapf Dingbats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
