Bookshelf Symbol 7 Font

Bookshelf Symbol 7 is a font from the family of symbol fonts, developed by Ricoh and associated with Microsoft products. It belongs to the category of 'pi fonts', meaning fonts whose glyphs are mainly intended to represent symbols, pictograms, ornaments, or special characters rather than ordinary text.

Its character set is particularly eclectic: it contains rare variants of Latin letters with unusual diacritics, a subset of International Phonetic Alphabet characters, musical symbols, mathematical and miscellaneous symbols, a torii, as well as Japanese characters, including some rare kanji and circled kanji.

In late 2003, the presence of several sensitive symbols in Bookshelf Symbol 7 drew the attention of Microsoft customers. Among them were two representations of the swastika: one upright, corresponding to the character 卐, and the other tilted at 45 degrees.

In December 2003, Microsoft announced measures to remove these glyphs from the font and stated that it had contacted several Jewish organizations. Steven Sinofsky, then a senior vice president of Microsoft Office, also published an open letter of apology on behalf of Microsoft. Simon Marks, an Office product manager, explained that the font originated from a set of Japanese fonts and that the presence of these symbols was not intentional in the context of their distribution with Office.

KB833407 is a Microsoft Office 2003 update designed to modify the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font. It removes several glyphs considered problematic, including the two representations of the swastika and a Star of David that occupied positions 0x74, 0x7E, and 0x86.

A text message can be encoded with Bookshelf Symbol 7 by replacing Latin (ASCII) characters with those associated with them in the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font according to the lookup table:

Consult the lookup table matching the characters used by the font with the displayed glyphs.

The visual signature of Bookshelf Symbol 7 is an unusual mixture of characters: Latin letters with unusual diacritics, small capitals and International Phonetic Alphabet letters, musical symbols such as the treble clef, quarter note, whole note, and fermata, as well as mathematical and miscellaneous symbols such as plus-minus, check mark, heart, spade, and asterism.

The font also contains a torii, Japanese characters, and circled kanji such as 悪 and 善.

Bookshelf Symbol 7 is a TrueType font. Its file is generally named BSSYM7.TTF.

Open Bookshelf Symbol 7 in the Windows Character Map or a TrueType font viewer, then check the three positions 0x74, 0x7E, and 0x86. If they exist, it is version 1.0.