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I recently noticed that Microsoft Word and other applications show ZapfDingbats in the font list, and it seems to be identical to Wingdings, except that it doesn't appear in the fonts folder. I am quite sure it wasn't there before and I didn't install anything recently, so I am suspicious of it. Any suggestions as to how I can find its real source? I tried searching online but found no clue.

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  • It's a fairly common font which includes mostly "graphic" characters -- squares and diamonds and funny squiggly things. Microsoft has their own rip-off of the font called "Wingdings". This might display on some systems:  (But not mine -- it just comes through as UTF16 boxes.) Nov 23, 2013 at 19:51
  • I also see hexadecimal codes instead of characters, and I don't get your point. Do you know how I can find the source of the font or at least where the font file resides on my system? I did a search for "zd", "zapf", ".pfm", ".pfb" but couldn't find the font.
    – user21820
    Nov 24, 2013 at 3:35
  • Basically, if you're using Word you'd use Wingdings instead, though I don't know if it produces roughly equivalent graphics for the code points. You presumably picked up the font because at some point you processed a document from OpenOffice or some such that referenced Zapf. Nov 24, 2013 at 3:39
  • I don't have open office on my computer, and how do I get a font just by opening a file with a reference to it? I thought it would just not display correctly if I don't have it? Also, where can the actual font file be? I would like to trace where it came from.
    – user21820
    Nov 24, 2013 at 3:44
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    It's possible you got it as an embedded font in a PowerPoint doc: pptfaq.com/FAQ00076_Embedding_fonts.htm (And this apparently applies to Word docs as well.) Nov 24, 2013 at 3:56

3 Answers 3

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Zapf Dingbats is a copyrighted font used by many applications. It is in several Adobe utilities and one of these may have put it on your system.

It is not normally a TTF file or other Microsoft format so may not show up so easily.

It is not, in itself, anything to worry about.

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  • I know that some Adobe utilities use it, but which ones specifically? Also, according to Windows, the only thing I installed recently is Wireshark. Does that use ZapfDingbats? I don't install updates for Adobe software.
    – user21820
    Nov 24, 2013 at 3:43
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Daniel R Hicks gave me an idea to search Google for "office fonts stored" and I found this forum post about font substitution and this article about the Registry keys for font substitution. Then I tried searching my registry for "ZapfDingbats" and found it under HKEY_USERS\S[...]\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\MathFonts with a whole lot of other values with names of the form "Z@R*.tmp". These look odd to me, so I would like to ask if anyone knows what they mean before I do anything to them. Thanks a lot!

[Edit:

Well so I went ahead to delete the whole key (after backing it up of course) and Microsoft Word promptly put it back, but without those strange values besides some other slight differences. But since there wasn't anywhere else in the registry that it could have been taking the fonts from, I suspected some other source. Indeed I finally found this blog post about the same issue with Helvetica that looks like Arial and this Microsoft support article about where fonts in Microsoft Word come from. My default printer is PDFCreator, and it has exactly that list of fonts as in that registry key in its font substitution table under advanced settings.

The setting didn't actually seem to work as intended, because Arial was by default substituted by Helvetica but printing text in Arial to PDFCreator didn't result in the text in Helvetica. However, changing the default printer to some other printer caused the few extra fonts including ZapfDingbats to disappear from the font list in Microsoft Word with immediate effect. So this is the answer to the question; I must have set PDFCreator as the default printer recently.

]

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Zapf Dingbats was included in the Postscript II Printer font set. If you ever connected to a printer with the PS II font set, or used a Postscript Printer Description (PPD) file, or a program that assumed those fonts were available, the font lists can get added your system -- without actually adding the font files, in some cases. Many programs, including versions of MS Office, included TrueType versions of the PSII fonts over the years. The PostScript fonts article has details (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts). As you mentioned, connecting to a virtual printer such as PDF creator can pollute your system's font list.

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  • This is a super old question, but thanks for writing your answer! =)
    – user21820
    Feb 14, 2018 at 11:41

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