I Stand Corrected: Webdings do not come with Silverlight

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Last month, I wrote this blog post on how I was using the Webdings typeface to create graphics for Silverlight applications.  Well, on Friday I got my MacBook and instantly saw that with Silverlight installed, Webding characters were not showing up in my Silverlight applications on the Mac.  I went to the latest Silverlight SDK and found this:

Fonts that are available or packaged with Silverlight 1.0

  • Arial
  • Arial Black
  • Comic Sans MS
  • Courier New
  • Lucida Grande
  • Lucida Sans Unicode
  • Times New Roman
  • Trebuchet MS
  • Verdana

Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans Unicode are aliases for the same font.

No Webdings!

I still think that the Webding typeface is useful, but if you want to use them in Silverlight, you should open your XAML in Expression Blend 2 September Preview and wherever you use Webdings, you should select the TextBlock element and pick Object...Path...Convert to Path to convert the characters to path outlines. It will no longer be text, but you will get the same visual.  You can actually do this with any text in your scene, not just Webdings.

Here is my pledge going forward with Silverlight (now that I have a MacBook):

I will test any Silverlight samples that I post on my MacBook (Firefox and Safari).

Thanks for your understanding and patience.  This is my first Mac and I'm still learning.