Font Awesome 4.1 released | Hacker News Reader

Font Awesome 4.1 released

fortawesome.github.io

105 pointsEduard45 comments

Just happy that they have Pied Piper:

https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/pied-piper-a... https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/pied-piper/

And it's code point is 'f1a8', aka 'fellate'...

Imho FA doesn't need so many brand icons or subculture symbols ala Star Wars at all. These should be separated from the core.

FA was a go to because it had a great set of useful generic icons, not because it included every symbol under the sun.

With font awesome, you are automatically using all of the icons however most sites likely use about 1%-5% of the total available icons. That means using font awesome is an unnecessary bloat on most sites. It would be nice if you could download each icon as a separate SVG (maybe you can, I didn't see how).

I prefer to find the SVG elements I need and base64 encode them directly into my CSS. That way you only include the assets you are using, minimize total KB and network requests. There are two tools I use to help with this:

1. https://github.com/svg/svgo (node)

2. https://gist.github.com/mrinterweb/11303706 (ruby - I wrote this one)

This is why I usually use http://fontello.com/ to just take the ones out I want, it's pretty nice

These ever-growing icon fonts make me wonder whether the Chinese were on to something when they designed their logograms. With 439 icons in this font alone, it might be possible to start writing simple prose using nothing but icons. Some extra icons are clearly needed to add concepts not normally expressed in icon form (personal pronouns, etc) but those are easily designed or borrowed from logographic scripts.

http://www.emojitales.com

"They lived in the L.T., which according to Harv was short for Leased Territories in letters. Nell already knew the mediaglyphics for it. Harv had also taught her the sign for Enchantment, which was the name of the Territory they lived; it was a princess sprinkling golden specks onto some gray houses, which turned yellow and bright were the specs touched them." -- The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson

I had to look it up -- I remembered the mediaglyphs as being part of the narrative in Snow Crash, not Diamond Age.

I absolutely think the Chinese "were on to something" -- it might not be commonly known, but one of the reasons for why Chinese (language) uses signs, is so that you can read text written by someone with whom you don't share a (oral) language. An efficient way to control an Empire that spans some 5-600 languages. Contrast with teaching all officials to speak and write Latin for example.

This is great!

Beginner question: Is there a way to manually remove the characters from the font files that aren't used to increase speed? Or, is this hosted on a CDN by someone?

fontello.com - pick and choose the icons you need. Includes the font awesome set.

[Icomoon](http://icomoon.io) lets you assemble your own icon font and includes Font Awesome.

If you're ok with GPL or Paid.

Well, yes. But you can also upload your own SVG's.

Another option: http://fontcustom.com/

The kind folks at bootstrapcdn.com host FontAwesome as well (seems like 4.1.0 is already up): http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/#fontawesome_tab

One thing to be aware of when using these fonts as I discovered on a large project today: this font won't work on windows phone 7 devices. Whilst these devices don't have much market share in the US it's quite a bit more in Europe (particularly the Nordic countries).

The reason is that wp7 doesn't support font-face. The fix is to hide the opacity of the :before pseudo selector that sets the content of the dom element. Then you still reserve the space and then set the actual element to a background of the svg for the icon.

It's a lot of work if you are using many icons but the alternative is unusable squares all over your application for WP7 users.

Gotta wonder if some of these new icons wouldn't have been better off split-up. Most people recognize the PDF file icon as a white box with a black outline but with a red symbol. Likewise the green W for Word.

http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/rebel is that really free to use (star wars rebel faction logo) ?

Still no middle finger. It's like they don't even care.

Request it: http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/community/#request...

It has been: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/2402

I was hoping to find sport icons added on this release. https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/767

Still no Ruby or Rails icons. Drupal has one though.

And of course, if you don't enable custom fonts in your browser, they still show up as boxes with hex digits (in Firefox, at least).

That's about five or six people affected by that problem then...

hehe ;)

You might be surprised there. The fonts don't show up for those who use NoScript in default-deny mode (which is the suggested, and default, mode for this popular extension) either. Yes, this is solved by allowing the specific script (which?) to run for that page. I generally just leave the page as it is, showing funny characters instead of the intended icons.

Serious question: At this point, when you use noscript, don't you expect the web to be broken more places than not?

Serious answer: those sites which insist on being unusable for those who don't run scripts - be it those running text-based browsers of those who block scripts - are not worth visiting in my not that humble opinion.

I deem a site to be usable when the content can be read. Sometimes this means scrolling through an un-styled list of links and sundry before I can read whatever the site tries to convey. So be it.

What scripts? The topic at hand is usage of custom fonts. Should we use images instead to please you?

I'm one of six, apparently.

Make it six or seven.

Doesn't Firefox come with custom fonts enabled by default though ? It has always been displayed correctly for me and I never had to switch anything on or off.

Could the same goal be achieved with custom fonts disabled ?

Perhaps. I think he was implying that he turned it off manually. I don't think it can shown with custom fonts disabled, as it is an icon set as a custom font.

All four of you are crushed, I'm sure. ;)

I'm one of four, apparently.

Do you mean if you disable custom fonts in your browser? I was under the impression that all modern browsers enabled them by default now.

Image based icons will similarly fail for people who don't enable images in their browser. In other news, this is a much faster way to load and display icons at appropriate resolutions for the 99.99% of the interest who can view fonts.

Only two transportation icons have been added: automobile and cab. Where is bus, train, or the subway?

This has been out for a few days, and i'm happy to see the HN and Reddit icons!

Seriously? They still haven't got a blog icon?

[0] https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/455

There's quite a backlog of requested icons. The pace is definitely not for everyone, but at least the eventual product is of high quality.

This is an apt example of why we need a native +1 system for GitHub issues.

That's all very well, but seriously a "Pied Piper" icon was more of a priority than a blog one? This I do not understand.

Someone obviously made that for fun. When you give your work away for free, you get to choose to work on fun things sometimes.

And no Wikipedia.

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