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Comment by jazzdev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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✔ 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.

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

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

I believe font squirrel http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ can do subsetting for you and then output all formats.

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.

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