Show HN: Font Awesome to PNG

I personally prefer IcoMoon which generally has a lot more options and their font builder (for custom glyphs) works much better.

We've started using fontello recently. We use some custom svg assets in addition to the icon font sets. I wrote a ~100 line python script that manages interactions with fontello. It'll open a browser with our config file, let you make changes, then download and store the updated fontello assets mostly from the command line. I highly recommend doing something like this if you get on board the fontello train.

You can also make subsets with any font on Google Fonts, using the text= parameter e.g. https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Creepster&text=JAVSC...

Is there a similar library that can use local assets? I'd prefer to remove an external website dependency from my build process if possible.

A lot of font-icons allow you to set the the icon using class names. So rather than linking to a specific image file or using some obscure ascii code like in the stackoverflow example you linked to, I can just add a class name like 'icon-user' and the user icon will show up. It's definitely easier in some situations.

Font icons are scalable too, which makes it really easy to change the icon size on the fly. Since I do all of my development directly in the browser, I never know how big I need my icons until I've done some experimenting with different sizes. Font icons make this experimentation process a lot easier because I don't need to update an image file. I can just change the font-size property in css.

Minified, Fontawesome is 21kb - which for a single HTTP request [1] the ability to use all of the icons at any size and color and have them look fantastic (for values of "fantastic" that mean no jaggies).

It's incredibly convenient not to have to generate multiple sizes of icon/pictograms for a project. Beyond even just needing multiple sizes for different uses (a list vs a header) - with the advent of high dpi mobile screens you'll also need to re-generate all of the images in @2x versions if you want the images to not look fuzzy.

Beyond that, there is now a whole ecosystem of addons that make use of the library

One of several different icon pickers: http://victor-valencia.github.io/bootstrap-iconpicker/

Leaflet Map Markers: https://github.com/lvoogdt/Leaflet.awesome-markers

1 - BootstrapCDN will even host it for you: http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/#fontawesome_tab

The author is providing some use cases on the website. Other than that, I find this particularly useful for mobile applications. Embedding a font and rendering a text component with a custom font is less than optimal just for using some icons.

There are some cases where you don't want the whole bunch of font-awesome in your project, illustration or what ever. E.g. for mockups it's very easy to use, you just use it to drag and drop the icons you want.

"Why am I useful you might ask? While I find your question a bit offending..."

'Why' was the first thing I was thinking but apparently offensive!

It's just a single-purpose little hack, not a product, let the author have his fun.

This.

From an perfectionist perspective - a font is a font, those were made for text. They're used for icons just because it's widely supported option that allows arbitrary coloring and scaling - so when one need a red 0.6cm-sized icon, they get it with a simple directive.

SVG is a graphic format that also has such possibilities while being more semantically correct by not even slightly abusing text (even though icon fonts generally use that private Unicode area).

https://github.com/odyniec/font-awesome-to-png/blob/master/f...

That's potentially a really poor way of doing it; if your browser/OS does subpixel rendering the resulting PNG could look terrible on other machines.

Resizing PNGs? Works only reasonable if you make them smaller...

In what way?

  It's googlable.

  It's unique.

  It describes exactly what it does.

  And if follows a huge tradition of x2y tools (pdf2text,      etc etc).