Well, I'm glad a number of you seemed to like that post where I investigated comic sans, so here's an addendum! There's this one thing in the descriptions of Comic Sans Pro that I didn't notice before, but now that I'm really looking into it... well, here it is on Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
Comic Sans Pro is an updated version of Comic Sans created by Terrance Weinzierl from Monotype Imaging. While retaining the original designs of the core characters, it expands the typeface by adding new italic variants, in addition to swashes, small capitals, extra ornaments and symbols including speech bubbles, onomatopoeia and dingbats, as well as text figures and other stylistic alternatives.
Where are the "speech bubbles, onomatopoeia and dingbats"? I couldn't find any when just messing around with the font. Maybe they're only in the real Comic Sans Pro, not the mysterious Comic Sans version 5.14 that I have. But they'd probably be mapped to some weird symbols, so the only good way to find them is through what I should have done from the beginning: opening comic.ttf in FontForge and looking through all of the glyphs in the font. And right at the end of the list...
They're in here! But they're not defined to anything? So far as I can tell looking through what's in FontForge, none of these glyphs are produced as a result of ligatures, or font features, or specific unicode characters or anything else. It just doesn't seem to be possible to make some text editor display one of these glyphs when using the font. Either Microsoft Word 2010 had the ability to insert characters that weren't otherwise defined (perhaps as some proprietary special feature just for their own fonts like this one), or between Comic Sans Pro and this version these characters were broken on purpose. Not sure why they'd actually be left in the font if that was it, though.
Anyway by copying and pasting text out of this one pdf cited on Wikipedia and seemingly an official promo for the "Ascender 2010 Font Pack" which included Comic Sans 2010 (now Comic Sans Pro?), it seems these extra symbols (at least in this pdf) were represented by codepoints in the unicode private use area, specifically U+E1CA through U+E1E3. I suppose it's as good a place as any, so I updated my copy of the font:
That pdf notes that these ornaments "can be used in a variety of ways". But all I think looking at these is that they look like text markup from some sort of absurd interactive fiction video game. So of course I had to - no, i didn't make that game. I think the joke would stop being funny pretty quickly and then I don't have enough writing skill to maintain that. Just so I can be probably one of the first people to use the ornaments in years, here's one page of it though!
also in pdf format if you click through :)
