Zapf Dingbats

ITC Zapf Dingbats is one of the more common dingbat typefaces. It was designed by the typographer Hermann Zapf in 1978 and licensed by International Typeface Corporation.

In 1977, Zapf created about 1,000 (or over 1,200 according to Linotype) sketches of signs and symbols. ITC chose from those a subset of 360 symbols, ornaments and typographic elements based on the original designs, which became known as ITC Zapf Dingbats. The font first gained wide distribution when ITC Zapf Dingbats, which consists of the subset chosen by ITC, became one of 35 PostScript fonts built into Apple's LaserWriter Plus.^{[citation needed]}

When ITC Zapf Dingbats was first announced in U&lc magazine, volume 5-2, the family was divided into the 100 series (ITC-100), 200 series (ITC-200), 300 series (ITC-300). Each series contains 120 symbols.

Zapf Dingbats series 100 became widely implemented on PostScript printers, and gained currency as a pi font encoding in the 1980s and early 1990s. It incorporates several rightward-facing arrows without counterparts for the other three cardinal directions, on the assumption that it would be used in contexts allowing rotation of text characters.

The ITC glyph set is included in Unicode and it is one of the "Basic 14" typefaces guaranteed to be available for PDF files.

ZapfDingbats, the PostScript version of ITC Zapf Dingbats, is distributed with Acrobat Reader 5 and 5.1.

URW++ donated a version of ZapfDingbats to GhostScript under the non-commercial Aladdin Free Public License. The font can be found in GhostPCL source code, as D050000L.ttf.

ITC Zapf Dingbats Std is an OpenType version of the font family, based on the PostScript variant of the font. The glyphs are mapped to the corresponding Unicode code points. The family consists of 1 font (ITC Zapf Dingbats Medium) with 204 glyphs.