2011/8/16 Wolfgang Schuster <schuster.wolfgang@googlemail.com>
Instead of using something like ;-}, what looks nice, but is not the highpoint of typography, I would like to use something like \smiley, \grin, \cool, …


You need a font with the symbol, there are also fonts available where you can use layers to use different colors for parts of the symbol.

- http://www.ffdingbatsfont.com/
http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2011/057859.html

I am still quite inexperienced with ConTeXt. I found the following document:
    http://statweb.calpoly.edu/jdoi/web/reference/symbols-a4.pdf

It is for LaTeX, but I can not find ConTeXt specific stuff. In table 188 there is a smiley. This brought me to to following:
\starttext

\usesymbols[wasy]

\symbol[was][smiley]

\symbol[was][qed]

\showsymbolset[general]
% \showsymbolset[music]
% \showsymbolset[astronomy]
% \showsymbolset[astrology]
% \showsymbolset[geometry]
% \showsymbolset[physics]
% \showsymbolset[apl]

\stoptext
 

The smiley does not display, instead I get the text smiley. Also it is not shown with the \showsymbolset. Why?

Is there any documentation about how to work –for example– with the dingbats font. At the moment I am just feeling like shooting in the dark. :-{
When knowing how to do it, I could try to make a smiley module. ;-}

By the way: do I understand correctly that with \showsymbolset the second column shows how the character is displayed and the third columns shows the used space for the character?

--
Cecil Westerhof