DINGBATS??!! Don't know why they are called this. But some ttf fonts have symbols and/or other fancy designs that appear instead of the numbers and letters of the alphabet.

To help make life simpler for the rest of us, Susan put together this wonderful collection of all the dingbats and some other unusual fonts that are already installed at Arbor Image Magick.

So from Susan's page, let's work with the font dingbat called "Fleurons." We have an image and we'll frame it, using Decorate. But we want to make the frame a little fancier. Let's try the decorative figure produced with the lower case "h" on our keyboard.

Here's an image we'll use:

Apply just a simple framing job: 20x20 border (gray), 20x20 sunken and finally 5x5 raise:

Now we'll apply the decorative Fleurons "h" to each corner:

1. Click on Annotate.
2. In Offset box, type in +125+5 and Gravity = northwest.
3. Fill and stroke colors = gray
4. Point size = 36 and Stroke width = 1
5. Click on Fleurons in the fonts box
6. Click on annotate under the offset

You show see the Fleurons "h" in the upper right corner of the image's frame. Now you need to decorate the other 3 corners. Do not change anything in the Annotate tool.

1. Click on Transform and select Flop.
2. When you see the flopped image, click on Annotate, then click on annotate under the offset box. Now both upper corners are decorated.
3. Go to Transform, but select Flip. The image will now be upside down.
4. Go to Annotate again and click on annotate.
5. Transform-Flop.
6. Annotate the same way. Now all 4 corners are decorated.
7. Transform-Flip to get the image right side up again.

Here's another image treated in a similar fashion. I bordered the sides only, then used a decoratve font or dingbat along only the right side. Then I cropped off the border on the left side. "Three Pears" Sorry, but I don't remember which font I used.

If you use a black border around your image and then annotate the dingbats onto the black border, they will look like they are floating around the image when used on a black webpage.

Remember, there are all sorts of decorative effects you can get with this technique, the only limitation being your own imagination and creativity.

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