Wingdings Translator
This Wingdings translator turns ordinary text into the symbols of the famous Wingdings font, and translates strings of Wingdings symbols back into readable text. Type or paste into the box, choose the direction, and the result appears instantly with a copy button. Wingdings began life in 1990 when Microsoft combined three Lucida icon fonts into a single dingbat typeface, and it works by rendering each keyboard character as a picture: type a capital J and you get a smiley face, an N gives the skull and crossbones, and a Z produces the star and crescent. For decades those pictures lived only inside the font itself, so you could not copy them anywhere useful. This translator uses the official Unicode equivalents instead, the real symbol characters that Unicode added in 2014 precisely so that Wingdings content could be exchanged as plain text. That means the symbols you copy here survive in social bios, chat messages, forum posts and documents without the Wingdings font being installed. You can use the translator to decode messages written in the font, to recreate the look for puzzles and games, or simply to see what your name turns into. Each of the 94 printable keyboard characters has its own symbol, and everything else passes through unchanged.
The mapping uses the official Unicode equivalents of the Wingdings glyphs, so what you copy is real text. Some devices draw a few of the symbols in colourful emoji style, and very old devices may show boxes.
Capital and lowercase letters map to different symbols, exactly as the font behaves. Spaces and any character outside the 94 mapped ones pass through unchanged.
How it works
The original font holds a picture for each of the 94 printable characters on a standard keyboard, the codes 33 to 126 that cover punctuation, digits and both alphabets. When Unicode 7.0 added official equivalents for the Wingdings glyphs in 2014, each of those pictures gained a real character of its own, from the lower left pencil (U+1F589) that the font shows for an exclamation mark through to the heavy quotation ornament (U+1F677) it shows for a tilde. The translator carries that table in both directions. Going to Wingdings, each character of your text selects its symbol by keyboard code: the digits produce folders, documents and office equipment, the capitals run through hands, faces and religious and celestial symbols, and the lowercase letters cover the twelve zodiac signs followed by geometric shapes. Coming back, each symbol is looked up by its code point in the reverse table and replaced with the keyboard character that produces it. Anything outside the mapped set, including spaces and macrons, passes through untouched in both directions.
Worked example
Type Hello NZ with the direction set to text to Wingdings. The capital H maps to the pointing hand 🖗, the e to the Scorpius sign ♏, each l to the black circle ⚫, the o to the white square 🞏, the N to the skull and crossbones 🕱 and the Z to the star and crescent ☪, while the space passes through, so the result is 🖗♏⚫⚫🞏 🕱☪. Of the 8 characters entered, 7 are translated and 1 passes through unchanged. Switch the direction to Wingdings to text and paste 🖗♏⚫⚫🞏 🕱☪ back in, and each symbol is matched by code point to its keyboard character, returning Hello NZ.
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