Wingdings and other 256-character symbol fonts are out-of-date. They do not work consistently on the web, unless you use them in something like a PDF file or some other file format in which the font is embedded. Only in such cases are they guaranteed to work.
Otherwise, in normal HTML, XML, and forum usage, only Unicode characters in Unicode fonts are guaranteed to come out roughly the same on most browsers.
The old symbol fonts use a technology in which the symbols are understood by their order in the font, not by their Unicode values. Don’t try to use Zapf Dingbats, Symbol, Wingdings, Webdings or any other symbol font on the web in HTML or XML or a post in a forum. You will often be disappointed. Old symbol fonts are those which are 256 characters, or less, in which the normal characters are replaced by odd symbols and pictures.
Some of the Wingding characters are in Unicode, but with different encodings. See http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html . This page, in the first column, indicates how they may be interpreted on Windows machines where Windows is set up for a Western European language such as English. Some browsers will display the Wingdings characters properly but many will not and by HTML and XML standards they are not supposed to.
The seventh column gives the hexadecimal value of approximately the same glyph in Unicode. You can type & # x (without the spaces) followed by the hex number followed by a semi-colon (;) to create an HTML hexadecimal entity which will give you the same character in many forums, including this one. For example, to get the pencil symbol ✏ you type the hexadecimal entity “& # x 2 7 0 F ;” without the spaces in this forum and it becomes the pencil symbol itself when you preview or post.
You can also press the left Alt key, press the numeric keypad plus key, type the hex symbol character and then raise the left Alt key. (The right Alt key also works on many systems.) You will probably have to set your system up to do this. See http://www.fileformat.info/tip/microsoft/enter_unicode.htm , which among other things, tells you how to change your registry to make this work. Or you can download and install the Quick Unicode Input Tool from http://www.cardbox.com/quick.htm which allows you to enter Unicode characters by both their hexadecimal and decimal values.
Note that this only works for characters from 0 to FFFF hexadecimal or to 65535 decimal. Higher characters you will have to enter by copying and pasting or using some other method. The free Babel Map utility from http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html is similar to Character Map, but more powerful and covers the higher characters if some of them are in the font being viewed.
The first page I linked to also says, correctly:
“For Windows, browsers such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Netscape 4 that are not standards-compliant allow non-Unicode fonts such as Wingdings to be specified in HTML or CSS, to enable additional special characters to be displayed. Specifying Wingdings font is contrary to the published specifications, has never been a documented feature of HTML, is not reliable, and should not be done. Wingdings is not available on all computers, and so the intended characters may not appear on computers running non-Microsoft operating systems such as Mac OS 9, Mac OS X 10 or Linux. The intended characters are also unlikely to appear when using a standards-compliant browser such as Firefox, Netscape 6+, Opera 6+, Safari 3+ or SeaMonkey (formerly Mozilla). The same problems are found with the Webdings, Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 fonts – they should not be used in Web pages.”
See also http://www.skynet.ie/~caolan/wingdings/proposal/ , http://pagesfaq.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-do-i-type-wingdings-in-pages.html , and http://girtby.net/archives/2005/03/17/dont-use-wingdings/ .
For lists of all Unicode characters currently available, see http://www.unicode.org/charts/ , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters , and http://www-atm.physics.ox.ac.uk/user/iwi/charmap.html . Note that the Google Chrome browser has problems displaying some of them, even if you have them in a font.
For a Unicode symbol font, try the free Symbola font from http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ .
Note, if you set your font in Notepad to Wingdings, then it will appear properly there, but still won’t paste properly into other applications unless the font Wingdings is also set there, and will still not paste properly onto the web in a format where it is universally visible.