Add cell dingbat to cell, to display using DisplayForm

Question

I'm programically constructing a palette, and trying to add items/cells to the palette with a dingbat. The cells themselves have a style of "Item" which should show up with the dingbat, but when adding the cell to the palette via DisplayForm[cell], the dingbat doesn't show.

OpenerView[{"Definitions", Column[(DisplayForm[#])&/@definitions]}]

@definitions is a list of full form Cell expressions, with a style of Item. I've tried manipulating the cell with CellStyle, Style, and other techniques before adding the cell to the palette, with no luck.

For instance:

 definitions = {Cell[TextData[{"A ", StyleBox["unit vector", FontWeight -> "Bold"],
   " is a vector that has a magnitude of 1, with no units."}], "Item",
   CellChangeTimes -> {{3.726004891*10^9, 3.726004913*10^9}},
   CellTags -> "definition"]};

After trial and error, I was able to prepend a dingbat to the text in the cell like

PrependTo[cell[[1,1]], StyleBox["\[FilledSquare] ", Red]];

But it would be nice to know how to do it using a CellDingbat.

Answer 1

Some options make more sense when the Cell is in the list of Cells of a Notebook[{cell1, cell2,...}] and less sense when the cell is an inline cell as in the OP's use. For instance CellMargins is one these. Apparently CellDingbat is also. Just adding CellDingbat -> StyleBox["\[FilledSquare]", Red] manually to the cell can confirm this. One can see that the CellDingbat is in the output cell by selecting the cell and using the menu command Cell > Show Expression. One can also see that the dingbat is not displayed. One might go further and map CellPrint /@ definitions (after adding CellDingbat, of course) to see that the dingbat is displayed in this form.

From this I infer that the CellDingbat option is ignored when displaying an inline cell. I cannot find documentation to confirm this, though.