

Icon fonts and their usefulness in iOS development - designatedInit
http://kylerosenbluth.com/2012/10/8/fonts

======
citruspi
Anyone interested in using Icon Fonts should definitely check out [1] - it
allows you to generate and download icon fonts by selecting vectors from
different packs.

[1] <http://icomoon.io/app/>

~~~
citruspi
Haha, yeah... I originally found out about it when browsing the Chrome Store
[1] - if you download it as a Chrome app, then it even works offline..

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icomoon/kppingdhha...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icomoon/kppingdhhalimbaehfmhldppemnmlcjd)

------
primitur
What, no FF Chartwell?

<http://tktype.com/chartwell.php>

As long as you can turn on ligatures in your font rendering API per-platform,
this is a fully cross-platform solution to graphing, in a font file.

(Using printf's, basically, to do complicated graphs - absurd and awesome!)

~~~
chrisdroukas

       Hinting and the Web
       Webfonts are not currently offered.

------
maratd
Ok, I might be a bit slow. Can somebody explain to me the advantage of using a
font file instead of a sprite png?

I understand that there would be advantages with a high resolution display. It
would scale automatically. Anything beside that?

~~~
lucian1900
The better question is what does this gain you over a vector format.

~~~
pyre
Can you do sprites with a svg, though? If not, there's the single file aspect.

~~~
sahaskatta
I just started using it icon fonts. I was initially using SVGs using an IMG
tag, but the issue there is that you can't change color, opacity, or style it
with CSS.

You can sprite SVGs, but you have to maintain it just as you would have to
maintain a sprite of PNGs. The only advantage being that a sprited SVG would
scale to a HDPI monitor without needing a second set of higher resolution
images.

I ended up going with icon fonts because it requires significantly less CSS
than dealing with the position of an icon in a sprite. I actually find it is
easier to maintain since I can style icons with shadows, opacity, color, etc.

One drawback, using icon fonts generally means having flat icons. You can't
have fancy 3D-like iconography.

------
jogloran
I wrote a script which generates iOS tab bar icon-sized sprites from the Font
Awesome icon font: <https://github.com/jogloran/Font-Awesome>

------
nwienert
This title is pretty poor, could we get it changed to "How to use icon fonts
in iOS development and why they are useful" or something like that?

~~~
designatedInit
Sure thing.

