

The icons should look good at small sizes. It should have an acceptable open source license. However, the font should meet specific requirements. If you know a good icon font, you can suggest it to Fontello for them to include in their list of fonts on the Homepage. htaccess file - AddType application/x-font-ttf ttc ttfĪddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject eot You can also set the right mime-type for all the font files by adding the following lines to your.

All you have to do is include it in your projects.
#IMPORT SVG INTO FONTFORGE DOWNLOAD#
Fontello already creates such a file for you when you download the generated font. If you have to upload files on a different domain and can’t set the CORS headers either, you can embed the font files directly into the CSS. Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*" This can be done by adding the following lines in your. If you are uploading the font files that you created on a separate domain, you will have to make sure that the server responds with proper CORS headers. It will only take 10 to 15 minutes and the gains are worth the effort.

If you just want to use a selection of font icons from the built-in ones available on Fontello, the process of creating a custom icon font is very simple. With Fontello, you can assign a single prefix of your own choice to all the icons. If you are using multiple icon fonts, you will have to keep track of different prefixes. For example, Font Awesome prefixes fa- to all its icons.

In addition to reducing page weight, they will also be reducing the number of requests made by the browser.īesides the performance gains, the service also allows you to give a uniform name to your icons. If they don’t have to use all the weather and social icons, they can use Fontello to combine the fonts in a single file. In certain situations, a website might be loading two different font files to load weather and social media icons. I was loading eight different icons and the gain was about 70kb. Of course, the gains may vary depending on how many icons you need to load. See the Pen Fontello Icon Fonts by SitePoint ( on CodePen. However, the font file created with Fontello was only 4kb in size in my case. If you are using Font Awesome version 4.7, the font file loaded by the browser is about 75kb in size. Using Fontello can reduce page weight significantly. You can also combine icons from multiple open source projects like Font Awesome, Entypo and Typicons in a single file.
#IMPORT SVG INTO FONTFORGE FREE#
It is a great service that is free to use and allows you to create icon fonts from vector images. In this tutorial, you will learn about Fontello. This issue is not specific to just Font Awesome but most icon fonts in general. Loading the whole font file just to use about 10 or 20 icons increases the page load time unnecessarily. The only problem? You won’t probably use all 675 icons in a single project. The icons provided by this font range from Facebook and Twitter icons to objects like a bathtub and thermometer. In version 4.7, Font Awesome provides 675 different icons for users to use in their projects. If you have worked with icon fonts before, you have most probably used or heard about Font Awesome. On the other hand, if your project needs to support legacy browsers or your team has not yet taken the step of changing its workflow to accommodate SVG icons, it is worth looking into ways in which it’s possible to optimize the use of icon fonts at least. SVG images have some clear advantages, for example, you can create multi-color icons and your SVG images can also look sharper than icon fonts. We’ve explored a comparison of the two approaches here at SitePoint in the past. They are also much easier to use than image sprites.īefore getting too deep into icon fonts, if you are starting a new web design from scratch, keep in mind that using SVG images might be a better approach. You can change their size and color, or apply text-shadows with a few lines of CSS. Secondly, a lot of their properties can be controlled directly using CSS. They can scale up as much as needed without blurriness. Firstly, unlike regular images, font icons have no pixelation on high-resolution screens. There are a number of features that make icon fonts so useful. It is commonplace to see icon fonts used for a range of simple graphical elements around the web, from the display of social media icons inside sharing buttons on a website to a speech bubble icon that tells readers about the number of comments on an article.
