<p>I'm currently looking for a possibility in Java to identify a font as symbolic like OpenOffice does.
Characters with the font Windings or Webdings and so on should be rendered with the correct "pictures".</p>

<p>Anyone an idea how to distinguish between normal fonts and fonts with symbols?</p>

The bug
Java doesn't display all characters in the windows symbol font
gives a clue regarding a characteristic which is unique to symbol fonts.
They are part of
SYMBOL_CHARSET
(a WindowsCharsetName of a font.properties file)
So the [jdk1.6.0_10]\jre\lib\fontconfig.98.properties.src could be a first source of information to establish if a name of a font matches a symbol font, and should be loaded through
Property.load()
.