Is it possible to use Wingdings in an MSI with Wix?

Question

I am trying to use Wingdings in my Wix installer, specifically the characters at 0xFB and 0xFC. I tried unicode variants of these (✗, ✓), but since Wix/MSI requires a specific codepage, these do not work.

My TextStyle is:<TextStyle Id="Wingdings_Font_Normal" FaceName="Wingdings" Size="8" />

My control is: <Control Id="TestResult_Success" Type="Text" X="140" Y="237" Width="24" Height="24" Text="{\Wingding_Font_Normal}ü">

In my UI, a raw ü is rendered, rather than the Wingdings glyph for that character.

Is there some way to get Wingdings working with Wix/MSI?

EDIT:

After having a peek with Orca inside my compiled MSI, I've found that my TextStyle table is being generated correctly:

And the relevant lines of the control table:

I manually added a new TextStyle and changed the Text to use the new TextStyle, but was unable to get any Winding symbols to appear in my installer.

Answer 1

I don't have a citation to share but I'm 99.9% certain the answer is no. Windows Installer native/internal UI is about 16 years old and limited in numerous ways. To create a better UI experience you'd need to provide an external UI handler using a tool such as WiX Burn. This is how WiX provides it's enhanced UI experience. If you don't mind taking a dependency on .NET 3.0+ (which was included in Windows Vista and beyond by default ) you could go as far as use WPF to do the UI work.

Answer 2

You can do it by doing the following:

Create a new entry in the TextStyle table, like this for example:

After this you can reference to the new TextStyle in the Control Table (column "Text") just like this: {\WixUI_Font_Wingdings}YourAwesomeText