Is it possible to use Wingdings in an MSI with Wix?

Question

I am trying to use Wingdings in my Wix installer, specifically the characters at 0xFB and 0xFC. I tried unicode variants of these (✗, ✓), but since Wix/MSI requires a specific codepage, these do not work.

My TextStyle is:<TextStyle Id="Wingdings_Font_Normal" FaceName="Wingdings" Size="8" />

My control is: <Control Id="TestResult_Success" Type="Text" X="140" Y="237" Width="24" Height="24" Text="{\Wingding_Font_Normal}ü">

In my UI, a raw ü is rendered, rather than the Wingdings glyph for that character.

Is there some way to get Wingdings working with Wix/MSI?

EDIT:

After having a peek with Orca inside my compiled MSI, I've found that my TextStyle table is being generated correctly:

FontStyle Table from installer

And the relevant lines of the control table: Control Table from installer

I manually added a new TextStyle and changed the Text to use the new TextStyle, but was unable to get any Winding symbols to appear in my installer.

How does the control table look like? Can you massage the text in Orca and get a symbol to appear? If you can, try using Dark to reverse that back to XML and see what it looks like. — Christopher Painter, Jan 23 '15 at 16:45
I was not able to use Orca to get any symbols to appear. I'll have a look with Dark next. — Jesan Fafon, Jan 23 '15 at 16:54
The xml out of Dark looks the same as what I have in my source files, I.E. what I posted — Jesan Fafon, Jan 23 '15 at 16:55
I figured that. Could it be environment related? I am on Windows 8.1. — Jesan Fafon, Jan 23 '15 at 19:26
I doubt it. MSI hasn't changed in years. I would suggest looking at using bitmaps or maybe try a richtext control. I can tell you what an installer unit is ( 1/12 of the height of a 10 point MS Sans Serif font) but even this one is beyond me. I'm pretty sure MSI simply doesn't support Unicode because Windows 95 didn't support unicode but I don't know where that's written. — Christopher Painter, Jan 23 '15 at 19:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 22 '15 at 23:46

I don't have a citation to share but I'm 99.9% certain the answer is no. Windows Installer native/internal UI is about 16 years old and limited in numerous ways. To create a better UI experience you'd need to provide an external UI handler using a tool such as WiX Burn. This is how WiX provides it's enhanced UI experience. If you don't mind taking a dependency on .NET 3.0+ (which was included in Windows Vista and beyond by default ) you could go as far as use WPF to do the UI work.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 23 '15 at 09:28

0

You can do it by doing the following:

Create a new entry in the TextStyle table, like this for example:

TextStyle table
After this you can reference to the new TextStyle in the Control Table (column "Text") just like this: {\WixUI_Font_Wingdings}YourAwesomeText

answered Jan 23 '15 at 09:28

Tino John

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4

I assume you want to create a check mark (Wingdings: ü) which worked fine for me using this way. – Tino John Jan 23 '15 at 10:16
Can you show this in wxs xml rather then raw MSI table data? Maybe a screen shot showing the result? It'd be really interesting to see. – Christopher Painter Jan 23 '15 at 15:59
It would be interesting to see this in the xml. I'll mess around with Orca and see what the table looks like in my non-working version – Jesan Fafon Jan 23 '15 at 16:24
The TextStyle table of my compiled MSI has the rows I'd expect for my TextStyle: Wingdings_Font_Normal, Wingdings, 8, null, null – Jesan Fafon Jan 23 '15 at 16:28
What does the text in the Control table look like? – Christopher Painter Jan 23 '15 at 16:43

Is it possible to use Wingdings in an MSI with Wix?

2 Answers2