How Wingdings actually works
Wingdings is a symbol font Microsoft shipped with Windows in 1990. The font reuses the standard ASCII codepoints (0x20 through 0x7E) but draws a symbol glyph at each slot instead of a letter. So the byte that normally renders as A renders as a fish in Wingdings. That is why "converting to Wingdings" is really just "render the same text in a different font" - there is no transformation of the bytes themselves when you do it in Word.
For copy-paste workflows that is awkward, because the receiving app keeps interpreting the bytes as ASCII letters. The trick this tool uses is the Private Use Area (PUA) at U+F020-U+F07E, which Microsoft shipped Wingdings glyphs for via the legacy Symbol Font subset. Paste that PUA-encoded text into Word with the Wingdings font selected and you get the proper symbols. Paste it elsewhere and the apps render undefined glyphs (tofu boxes), which is correct - PUA codepoints have no agreed meaning outside the font.
If you want symbols that travel everywhere, use the Unicode Dingbats block (U+2700-U+27BF) instead - those are real Unicode characters with proper semantics. Try Unicode text converter for a more cross-platform symbol output.
How to use wingdings converter
- 1Paste or type your text into the input panel on the left.
- 2Output panel shows the same characters remapped to the Wingdings Private Use Area.
- 3Click Copy to copy the PUA-encoded result.
- 4Paste into Microsoft Word, Outlook, or any app that has the Wingdings font installed.
- 5Select the pasted text and apply the Wingdings font to render the proper symbol glyphs.
Keyboard shortcuts
Drive TextResult without touching the mouse.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Ctrl F | Open the find & replace panel inside the input Plus |
| Ctrl Z | Undo the last input change |
| Ctrl Shift Z | Redo |
| Ctrl Shift Enter | Toggle fullscreen focus on the editor Plus |
| Esc | Close find & replace, or exit fullscreen |
| Ctrl K | Open the command palette to jump to any tool Plus |
| Ctrl S | Save current workflow draft Plus |
| Ctrl P | Run a saved workflow Plus |
What this tool actually does
ASCII to Wingdings Private Use Area
Each printable ASCII character (0x20 space through 0x7E tilde) is shifted into the Wingdings 1 PUA block by adding 0xF000. So H (0x48) becomes 0xF048, i (0x69) becomes 0xF069, and so on. Non-ASCII input characters pass through unchanged.
Renders correctly in Word and Outlook only
The PUA range works because the Wingdings TrueType font ships glyphs at those positions. Apps without Wingdings (most browsers, modern web apps, Slack, Discord) render the codepoints as undefined-glyph boxes. That is the genuine Wingdings constraint, not a bug in this tool.
No round-trip back to ASCII
There is no automatic reverse: you would need to subtract 0xF000 from each PUA codepoint, which is essentially the same encoding step run backwards. Save your original input if you need it, or run the output through plain text converter for a generic Unicode-to-ASCII pass.
Worked example
The output looks like undefined-glyph tofu in this browser preview because the page does not load the Wingdings font. Paste it into Word with Wingdings selected and you will see the actual symbols.
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