Missing dingbat fonts in Pages
QSome of my fonts, including Webdings and Zapf Dingbats, aren’t available to use in Pages or TextEdit, though they do show up in LibreOffice, Scribus and other apps. Why not?
AIn Pages and some other apps, certain fonts don’t appear in the Format inspector, but are listed when you choose Format > Font > Show Fonts, and select All Fonts in the left pane of the window that appears.
If they don’t appear there, flush the font caches by starting up your Mac in Safe mode (see bit.ly/mfsafemd). Once that’s started up, restart back in normal mode. It’s also wise to check that those fonts aren’t broken or conflicted by using Font Book (bit.ly/mffntbk).
Even then, their behaviour often isn’t as you’d expect, because some fonts were designed before the widespread adoption of the Unicode standard. Under that, dingbat fonts offering symbols that aren’t part of that standard are supposed to use special private encodings. However, when those fonts were implemented they catered for systems that still worked with ASCII text, not Unicode, so they substituted their special symbols for characters that are supposed to represent letters from the Latin alphabet.
You can see this in the Character Viewer – in many apps, choose Edit > Emoji & Symbols. Select Dingbats on the left – if it’s not there, click the gear, choose Customize List and turn it on. You’ll see (in the right pane) that more modern fonts use codes in a Private Use Area for their special characters.