A big warning for anyone trying this out, don't use it in places where exact placement is required. Browsers (and operating systems) render fonts VERY differently. Just changing the cleartype-settings in windows can make the text placement completely off. Especially after a few letters as the error propagates the more characters you accumulate over one row. Might not be an issue if you only place one letter/icon, which is probably the use case here, but keep this in mind.
This is, I think, the biggest issue with abusing fonts in this way. As a workaround, icon fonts are excellent—but they are still undeniably a workaround. Unfortunately, SVG is the closest we have, and isn’t a viable solution either, for reasons other commenters have thoroughly addressed. I do have (what I think is) a better idea in mind, but I’m not sure how it would ever get adopted.
They are a "workaround" with long history: Windows 95 shipped Marlett for exactly this purpose of using fonts as well-supported vector graphics formats.
Oh, absolutely. It’s just a dealbreaker for me personally that fonts are monochromatic, single-layer, and difficult to position in web pages with precision and consistency. If those aren’t concerns, then icon fonts are a perfectly useful tool.
Why arent people using SVG for this sort of thing? Isnt that HTML5's vector graphics format?
I supose if you're using icons w/ the express purpose of using them with in-line text, then this would be Ideal... but just seems like a weird hack, when there is SVG available...
The author of this website claims to simply be ignorant of SVG at the bottom? whats up with that?
Why is using a font "hack" better than using the intended container for vector graphics?
I guess web design has always sorta been about pushing the bounderies of browser quirks, but I kinda thought we were moving away from that. You would think the intended use of vector graphics would be designed to be just as good if not better than using a font to do the same thing.
> Why arent people using SVG for this sort of thing? Isnt that HTML5's vector graphics format?
1. SVG is slow, text layout engines (therefore fonts) are fast
2. SVG support is pretty terrible (not available on Android < 3, IE <= 8 and that's for support at all, inline-svg-in-HTML is even rarer and it's even easier to hit shitty implementation bugs), fonts are very well supported
3. I don't think you can use SVG in pure CSS, so you need markup, not so with fonts (theoretically you can use SVG as background, practically I'm sure it works half the time best)
4. You can't hint SVG, so it does not scale well from big to small resolutions
5. Mixing SVG and HTML text is absolutely awful, mixing text in an iconic font and actual text is much easier
6. Iconic fonts are trivially "sprited" (bundle all the icons in a single font file), this is more complex in SVG
7. Changing the color of an iconic font to match a new or alternative layout takes all of a single CSS property, likewise to change font (therefore the style of all the iconset) (this assumes the iconsets use the same characters as hooks for equivalent symbols).
> You would think the intended use of vector graphics would be designed to be just as good if not better than using a font to do the same thing.
You would, wouldn't you? But it turns out fonts are very, very good vector formats for (physical) rendering sizes.
You make valid points, but some don't convince me:
1. For non-animated icons with few shapes it doesn't matter. SVG performance has come a long way — I've used SVG charts with 3000 nodes and it worked smoothly zoomed in on the 2048px iPad.
Also, rendering of individual font glyphs is not necessarily faster. Hinted subpixel rendering costs, and text rendering engines rely on speed savings from caching prepredered glyphs.
3. Possible, but admittedly ugly with `url(data:text/svg,…)` in CSS.
4. I bet those icon fonts don't have hinting either, and autohinting designed for letters may deform icons.
5. You can reference external SVG files or put SVG in CSS.
7. SVG is styleable with CSS (although CSS internal to the file), so you have even more options for styling icons (e.g. you can have separate colors for fill and stroke or even each part of the icon).
No, I defiantly have, and it does. For a standard 13 years in the making, the number of decent FULL FEATURED implementations is minuscule. Stuff that mostly works likes Inkscape tends to use it's own dialect and not fully support all the features.
There was an article posted here 1 day ago that explored to great lengths why SVG for scalable icons sounds good in theory - but does not work well in practice. And why icon fonts are the way to go for now.
See here: http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...
Key point: SVG icons don't actually scale that well because SVG lacks hinting.
No, the point of that piece was not that icon fonts are the way to go. It was that one vector icon can't just be rendered at different resolutions without changing the level of detail, and most icon designers use vectors to render their large sizes, but often resort to manual bitmap pixel pushing at smaller sizes to get the look they want.
The key point is that you need to design different vectors or bitmaps for different actual rendered sizes, with different levels of detail, and one design will never be suitable for all sizes.
Pixel hinting. The desired icons in this case are small ubiquitous monochrome glyphs. Text fonts and font renderers have already optimized that specific use-case tremendously - so why not plug into that.
On the other hand implementing pixel hinting of some shape in a font is quite likely equally hard then writing a JS generator of optimized SVG. Yet rendering speed may be a problem.
IE8 and Android 2.4 don't support it for one, but it does seem SVG has never really had traction. I've heard SVG has poorer rendering performance in most browsers (I'm not actually sure if that's true), and that some folks feel it makes it easier for their assets to be copied.
SVG is gaining traction, eg through use of d3.js. svgweb can work as an IE shim. Old Android is a problem, but on the other side Microsoft are doing a good job and pushing SVG in IE9+.
That has always confused me a bit. It seems that most of the stuff that people are doing with canvas requires writing a vector graphics layers on top of it anyway.
SVG would be wonderful if it were not for the lack of native support early on in browser land. That skips over the none trivial problem of what it takes to create a symbol/glyph in SVG. Not only do you have to be a competent typographer, but you also have to be a programmer (SVG is very Postscript like). Yet more barriers to widespread use. None of this is fatal, but like speed-bumps, it certainly slows things down. I'm in general more happy adopting a widely used Unicode font for the things that I need in this category. Your mileage may vary.
Why would you need to be a programmer to make a SVG symbol/glyph? All vector-drawing programs can export it these days. I think creating a font is more difficult.
Having said that, fonts do have some properties that can be advantageous for black-and-white icons; for example, automatically coloring with the text color and style.
You can create a subset of that font to serve if only using a few icons. I've done that with Scribophile thought I can't recall right now what utility I used to do that.
I am worried by this trend towards using a custom typeface to store icons. Firstly, whilst it looks great in the giant preview pages linked to on HN, these icons often look terrible at smaller sizes / without anti-aliasing. Secondly, whilst they're undoubtedly efficient when you're going to use a lot of them in various sizes, I question whether that's still true compared to an optimised PNG sprite (which coincidentally can solve the first problem too).
As always, use the right tool for the job. I've had some luck using icons fonts, but it's by no means a complete solution.
Something i would like to see though: ligature support in browsers. That would enable the creation of named icons in the font. so "right-arrow" would literally be a "right arrow".
Quick side note: I hit the "fancy view source" button on the bottom right and I thought it was pretty cool. Hoped it was a draggable bookmarklet, it's not, anyone have a favorite kick ass view source bookmarklet?
Icon-check then calls a JavaScript function which draws the icon to the canvas. The icon files end up being javascript files which can be gzipped along with other assets.
