Using Symbol Fonts for Easy Graphic Design

No doubt about it. Graphics spice up just about anything you print. They're also expensive. Clip art costs less, but you still have to scavenge for the right pieces and clip and paste them into your document. What you may not have realized is you probably have a whole slew of ready-to-go graphics in your font collection.

You can often find the symbol or accent you're looking for in a symbol font, like Zapf Dingbats or Wingdings. Symbol fonts -- which come loaded with most computers these days -- are easy to use. And if they're PostScript fonts, you can rescale them to any size without messy bit-mapping.

To view an entire symbol font alphabet on screen, go to Key Caps on your Mac, or Character Map under Accessories on your Windows PC. For even more symbol choices, don't forget to explore symbol fonts in both lower- and upper-case.

Try some of these tips using Dingbats or Wingdings:

• If you're preparing a customer questionnaire with many different check boxes, consider using these shadow boxes (q and r in either Zapf Dingbats or Wingdings):
  
  
  
• To emphasize a request for written information, try one of these symbols in Zapf Dingbats: period (.), slash (/), zero (0) and hyphen (-):
  
  
  
• To indicate that something needs to be cut or torn out, use these scissors symbols (Zapf Dingbats shift-1, shift-3, and shift-4):
  
  
  or use them along a dotted line, like this:
  
  
  
• If you're preparing a software manual and need to use some keyboard or screen symbols, you can find many of these in the Wingdings font, including (z, 1, 2, 4, M):
  
  

And, of course, to bring an important issue to a reader's attention, point it out:

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