What happened to the symbol fonts??

[A_New_View]

While I am happy to see all of the new fonts added, I am very dismayed over the removal of most of the options under the "Symbols" font. There are some symbols that I use in my designs often which are now gone.

This also poses the question, what about all of the designs that I already have which were made using those symbols? Will they be affected by this? 

I hope this is just a glitch on my end, but when I click on the "Symbols font now, only two options come up - the two which I rarely use. All of the others are gone.

[WHS_Designs · Accepted solution]

unfortunately, yes, they seem to have been retired. 😞 

for symbols that I use on a regular basis, I turn them into graphic (PNG) files and reedit my existing designs with them.

W.H. 

ETA: you might find these links helpful: 

• ALT Codes for Special Characters, Signs & Symbols (altcodeunicode.com)
• Windows ALT Codes Reference Chart (altcodeunicode.com)

[Cat]

A word of caution about using these. A while back Zazzle changed how they rendered these sorts of symbols, so suddenly they became much bigger than they were in the original design. It ruined a lot of my products. I've been re-making them using an image instead of the font character to fix them, and I'm really wary about using them going forward lest they decide to make another change and wipe out a few hundred more products.

[A_New_View]

Oh dear. I used these symbols as a border for some of my wedding invitations. I hope they're okay.

[WHS_Designs]

yeah, the heart was the symbol (plus the yin yang and western zodiac symbols) that got ruined for me, so I resaved them as PNGs instead (and redid many of my existing designs -- this was before a number of creators were most recently given replace design capability).

W.H.

[Cat]

I'm using svg files so I can change the color... which was the reason I used the font character instead of a png in the first place. Sigh.

[WHS_Designs]

Ack! Of course, I forgot all about SVGs. Good idea.

[Marcia]

@WHS_Designs at the risk of sounding stupid, how do you save these as pngs from the zazzle design tool?

[A_New_View]

I would like to know the answer to that question, too! I admit it - when it comes to technology, I'm stupid! lol

[WHS_Designs]

@Marcia @A_New_View 

Not at all! 🙂

I open a session of Word and copy the desired alt code into it (note: your Word file should have a white background).

I then select (highlight) the alt code and upsize it to a nice big size (say 50 pt).

I then deselect the alt code and hit a few hard returns.

I then do a screengrab using the Snipping Tool or Snip and Sketch (these apps are included with Microsoft Windows), and save the screengrab as a PNG file.

Now I can upload my PNG file to Zazzle (making sure that when I place it into my Zazzle design that I click on the radio button "All white in image" in the Remove white from Image options list).

W.H.

[Marcia]

@WHS_Designs thanks so much! I'll try this out tomorrow! 😊

[BKMuir]

So far, if you transfer the characters from one product to another, they are still working.

Copy and paste (from old product to new) doesn't seem to work.

[A_New_View]

Thanks. I did the same.

[Caprice]

Argh! Just went to use some of the symbol fonts...and found them missing.  Why?!  Why?!  😞