Font Awesome 3.0 Released - sub-setting, pixel perfect at 14px, better license | Hacker News Reader

Font Awesome 3.0 Released - sub-setting, pixel perfect at 14px, better license

fortawesome.github.com

100 pointsfortawesome27 comments

Every icon has been redesigned from the ground up to be pixel perfect at Bootstrap's default 14px. We've partnered with icnfnt.com to allow sub-setting of the font to get just the icons you use on your site, keeping load times way down. And there's a more open license (SIL Open Font License). And there's new styles with spinners.

Great work @fortawesome! 3.0 is now on BootstrapCDN: http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/fontawesome.html

Excellent! I'll see about adding that to the docs. Very helpful! Who do I talk to to get this updated for the next release?

@fortawesome just email me jdorfman at netdna dot com

Wow. Am I the only one who doesn't like the pixel-perfect alignment?

I hate to rain on the parade, but the v2 icons were beautiful -- all perfectly proportioned. Absolutely fantastic. The new ones have to distort things to align to the grid, and wind up looking inconsistent and unbalanced.

I'm comparing the new icons with my downloaded version of 2.0, and, for example, the "i" in the "info" icon is no longer centered. Or, now icons like "asterisk" or "ban-circle" have strokes that are too thick, while "envelope" is too skinny -- since strokes basically have to be 1px or 2px, I guess.

Previously, the icons were drawn in a balanced and consistent way, and all looked good together. Now, their widths and shapes have been shoehorned into a 14px grid that frankly destroys a lot of their charm and consistency.

Pixel-fitting made perfect sense when fonts weren't anti-aliased, but now that almost everyone has even subpixel hinting enabled, it's anachronistic. The FontAwesome team has done a great job with introducing new icons, but it saddens me to see what were once beautifully proportioned icons that showed excellent design taste, now take a giant step backwards.

In a strange way, it reminds me of when IKEA stopped using Futura and started using Verdana a couple years ago. Excellent design being replaced by mediocre design which is more "technologically accessible"...

Oof, noticed this too. I only use them in small sizes so it isn't worth the upgrade if it's just going to make them fuzzy and thinned-out. :/

The updates are specifically to improve the rendering at smaller font sizes.

Guess I'm confused then, because looking at them at the small sizes on the site itself, they have these issues.

It's the old "fuzzy approximation of real shape vs sharp representation of a shape altered to look sharp at low pixel density" argument all over again, which last flared up when Apple released Safari for Windows.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...

If you assume the other side is simply "doing it wrong" then conversation rapidly goes downhill, it's an engineering trade-off.

I personally like the fuzzy side of things, and I thought that they'd added hinting (possibly via ttfautohint) to make them sharp at small sizes on platforms than need hints (i.e. Windows basically). But, possibly to make it easier for people to contribute, they've conformed the icons to a grid at all sizes, and for all platforms, instead.

It's possible this was done to appease the Bootstrap devs, who were very picky about small scale rendering being pixel perfect and gave that as a reason for sticking with glyphicon hand drawn pngs. But its seems those same devs have chosen to go with fuzzy vectors glyphicons for Bootstrap 3.

I'll probably go with using those, which is a shame as I like the open contribution model and new license of Font-Awesome better. (Talking of which, how can it be openly licensed via SIL, but still allow glyph contributers to keep CC-BY-SA?)

I've even seen Android devs using these icon fonts now. It's actually one of the easiest way to do vector icons, and they can be colored dynamically using a Shader class.

What is a great way to constantly stay on top of changes to Font Awesome? Occasional c/p, or do some use git submodules?

I announce all major updates on twitter: @fortaweso_me.

Yet another great example of the problem with Twitter and not having any policy/business-plan for dealing with squatter accounts.

They should, if account is unusued for 3 months, send an email saying "are you still using this" and just ask the person to login to verify they are. If that email (and multiple subsequent) aren't answered within 3 months, the person initiating the "claim unusued handle" request gets the handle.

Apparently they're working on it: https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-...

Submodules and symlinks are way to underestimated. Use.

This looks great! I've seen it used before very well.

But the animated icon's look really naff. For me (Chrome version 23), they shake all over the place as they animate, does anyone else see this?

Yeah, that's one of the things I'm updating. Getting animations to appear the same in every browser is a pretty deep rabbit hole, and full of changing one breaks another.

This is a great tool that provides a lot of great icons! We use it at taskup.com and we're glad to see that more icons are added

imho (most of) those icons look better than glyphicons's vectorial ones in BS 3.0

Will the 14px perfection still look good at standard powers of 2?

Absolutely. Actually, it looks pretty good anywhere larger than 14px, too. But multiples of 14px will render best.

Hell yeah! I love font-awesome, use it for every Rails project.

Nitpick: "subset", not "sub-set"

Waiting for kickstrap now...

It's available now: http://getkickstrap.com/extras/permalink/fontawesome-30-3951...

Read instructions carefully.

Awesome work!

Great set.

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