Strange stuff. I can't get the same wingdings or webdings in Gimp 2.8x, Vista either.

I tried *bats in my Gimp 2.8.
The result is the following:
Regularly installed (adobe) dingbats just gave latin characters.
Regularly installed webdings (part of "corefonts") worked fine.
With regularly installed I mean from Gentoo repository.
I then searched dafont for dingbats and installed "Lomonesia-dingbats.
Works fine.
I did some more research and noticed that the two 'bats that work are ttf files.
Adobe dingbats comes as a .gz file.
When I gunzip it I noticed that it has regular ~ascii code + 3 or 4 byte (UTF8?) code that contains the pictures.
I don't have a copy of Gimp-2.6 anymore so couldn't try that.

So far I've never used dingbats or similar but I was just curious.
Gerard.

I found I have a copy of Gimp-2.6.after all.
Exactly the same behaviour as 2.8 as far as dingbats/webdings is concerned.
Gerard.

Good find Gerard, I would never have known cuz I never use them.

Thanks molly,me neither.
But I like to tinker and find out things.
Gerard.