Live data from Hacker News

Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

fortaweso.me

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#71
post #69

I have web fonts disabled (because of abuse by many developers) and this looks like rubbish. Perhaps there is way to fall back to image icons if font is not available?

Good question. What should happen when people also have images disabled (because of abuse by many developers)?

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#72
This is terrific! I've ported your fonts into my variant of the many twitter bootstrap rails gems out there (https://github.com/logical42/Bootstrapped-Rails). Thanks a bunch for this great work! This is going to make my life, and many others, much easier! :)

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#73
The icons look great! The font rendering engine is still the cheapest and most convenient way for having small scalable graphics.

Note that this trick is as old as Windows 3.1, as Raymond Chen points out in his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/16/10256...

(The blog name "Old New Thing" is spot-on as always :) )

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#74
post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

Have you tried embedding the font in the CSS? The overhead if the CSS is gzipped is small, and you save one request and the flashing text when the font is loaded.

Jammit http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/ (and presumably other asset packagers) does it automatically.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#75
post #69

I have web fonts disabled (because of abuse by many developers) and this looks like rubbish. Perhaps there is way to fall back to image icons if font is not available?

Good question. What should happen when people also have images disabled (because of abuse by many developers)?

I don't think many people have images disabled. Images are part of the web for a long time, however fonts are quite new and now every other blogger thinks it's a great idea to have a special, preferably unreadable, font.

But maybe you are right and the image fall-back is not such a great idea. I don't really know how characters are mapped to other font if one is not available but perhaps it would be possible to map them to something better in "standard fonts"? Just guessing here.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#76
post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

If you only need a low number of icons in a single size, then yes, bitmap icons are probably the way forward, but if you need lots of icons and you need them to be scaleable, then this is a great way to achieve it. I wish someone would create a tool that lets you pick only the icons you want and compile a new minimal font with just what you need in it (in all the formats necessary for safe cross browser embedding).

Pictos http://pictos.cc/server/ lets you build an icon font using only the icons you need also

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#77

I love font icons and these are great. Thanks for sharing. Two notes: 1) When I first started using font icons, I encountered an issue that might be worth sharing - you need to make sure your web server properly handles the more esoteric file types that are included in the @font-face declaration. 2) Paperclip icon!!!! I'm sad when these icon sets are missing this very useful metaphor for "attachment": not "my dog jus…

1) Good catch. I'll look into what's going on there. 2) I like the idea for a paperclip icon. I'll look into adding that into the next version. Watch the repo or follow @FontAweso_me on Twitter to stay apprised of updates.

As an app developer I miss the more real-life oriented icons that appears in Glyphish and Glyphicons. For example a train, meal, beer etc.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#78
post #70
post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

✔ it's also good practice to check unicode first. Arrows for example are available in all shapes and directions. ➜ So if there is an icon available in unicode just use that one.

Not necessarily if you want the weights to match other icons. But in many cases this is the best option.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#79
post #32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a comment in the stylesheet where the font is defined OK? That's what I usually do when the license requires attribution.

I feel like that would follow the intent behind a BSD license, but not that of a CC-BY. Actually, what's the advantage of using a commercial, attribution license over a BSD?

None. Advertising clauses were removed from pretty much all BSD licenses as they are unworkable.

Re: Font Awesome, the pictographic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

#80
post #70
post #60

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

✔ it's also good practice to check unicode first. Arrows for example are available in all shapes and directions. ➜ So if there is an icon available in unicode just use that one.

Support unicode doesn't necessarily mean the client has a compatible font. I couldn't see the "look of disapproval" emoticon (ಠ_ಠ) without having installed an appropriate font, for example.
Post reply on HN