Ding-a-Ling Web and Wing
Mac Tip#76/16-Oct-2002

Maybe you’re a lawyer and spend all your life writing deeply serious documents using the font Times.

Or maybe you’re not and your writing is a bit more casual, friendly or relaxed. Perhaps you have a little room to play.

If you mainly write emails this tip won’t be very useful as email systems can vary too much. But if you’re writing for print you can probably add some variety and fun to your documents absolutely free.

Open up a new document (Microsoft Word, AppleWorks or similar) and type out the alphabet, both upper and lower case. Or just copy the and paste the next two lines:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Screenshot of Dingbats etc.

Now select all of the letters and make them bigger — maybe 36 or 72 points so you can easily see what’s about to happen. Make sure the lines are still selected and find the font menu. Look for a font called Wingdings or Webdings or Zapf Dingbats and choose that font.

What you should now see is a wonderful selection of pictures you can use to spice up your documents: snowflakes, boxes, arrows, hearts, flowers, palm trees and planes, mountains and rivers, teardrops and bombs.

Click on the thumbnail picture for a fullsize screenshot.