The pointing hand (rightward) is the winning candidate, the 'flower' represents the sympathy candidate, etc. Even the checkmark in the last line is, I think, a Dingbat symbol. The old bomb with a lit fuse was Wingdings, and the oft-used skull and crossbones too, I think ... Zapf was happy stuff and Wingdings the unhappy, maybe, though some people definitely used Wingdings pointing fingers. Ahhhh, those were days.*
There was a joke back in the day that OT was possible only thanks to Dingbats (along with the Mac).
The obituary has some stuff I didn't know about Zapf, e.g. that he did a design for the Cherokee syllabary. >
But one oddity: The NYT often provides pronunciation guides on names and for Zapf, they give "DZAHFF" (in the print version and the online version this morning). In German, you would expect [tsapf]. The 'dz' might represent a lenited [ts] and he was from an area where lenition would be possible, if they gave a regional pronunciation. But I take the 'ah' to mean a long vowel, where I think relevant colloquial varieties, like the standard, should have a short vowel, at least in the noun of the same shape (cognate with English tap, as in beer) and there should be an affricate at the end. Anybody knows what's up here?
*Pointing fingers now trigger a bad reaction for many of us in Wisconsin, see here for the reason.
