But starting in 1985, Apple's laser printers included a resident font called -- designed by legendary font designer Hermann Zapf -- and the world began puzzling over just what the heck a "dingbat" is, and why they were called Zapf.
Before the advent of desktop publishing, a dingbat was simply a decorative printer's ornament used to end an article in a magazine or a chapter in a book, or as a typographical embellishment on a page. Many text fonts included a few dingbats created by the font's designer, but often a set of dingbats was gathered into a group for all-purpose use. Zapf Dingbats falls into this latter category, and its glyphs range from fleurons to geometric shapes, stars, checkmarks, circled numbers, and various arrows and pointers. If you've purchased professional typefaces, have a look at what's included -- they may have a font named Extras, which contains dingbats designed to be used with the typeface.
Exploring the characters of your dingbat fonts is an easy way to boost your typographical design options. To do this, use the Characters window available from the pulldown menu at the bottom of the Fonts window in many Mac OS X (iApp) applications. If you have QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, open the Glyphs palette or panel under the Window menu (usually located in a submenu). These Glyph viewers are also useful for discovering whether any of your other fonts include extra dingbat characters tucked into slots that would otherwise be used for text characters. Just scroll down to see all the gyphs available in a font. There are more than 100 slots available for letters, numbers, and other glyphs that font designers want to include. Even with non-English characters and accents, there are usually empty slots that the designer can fill with dingbats to complement the type characters.
As the desktop publishing revolution evolved, other companies developed similar dingbat fonts, such as Wingdings, Webdings, and Monotype Sorts. (Dingbat fonts are also known by other names such as Picture fonts, Pi fonts, or Symbol fonts.) In the early days of Web page design, these were often used to create icons.
A dingbat font isn't necessarily limited to printer's ornaments -- in fact, most aren't. They may contain literally any kind of line art, from scribbles to finely crafted flourishes, drawings, and logos. Adobe's Woodtype Ornaments and Letraset's Type Embellishments are excellent examples of finely crafted marks.