⁉️ Are icon fonts still a hack?

Font technology has changed a lot since we first started using icon fonts. Variable fonts, color fonts, aria attributes, advanced font loading & fallback strategies...

What's your stance today?

Roel Nieskens Today I converted a small collection of black and white SVG icons to a single woff2 font: the font is much smaller than the combined SVG files. Styling is super easy, too. Inline SVG was not a good option in my environment, and I was happy to get rid of the <img> references.

Just van Rossum Roel Nieskens Did that make use of your specialist technical know-how though? The average custom icon font is probably made by drawing icons in Adobe Illustrator, outputting them as SVG and then throwing the SVG into a tool like IcoMoon. Not sure if that approach would be as performant?

Ollie Williams Just van Rossum Roel Nieskens iconfont.cn have more than 20 million SVG icons where designers and front-enders can divide their work and utilize each other's strengths. The important thing is that they don't need to focus on the technical details of fonts.

一丝 Just van Rossum Roel Nieskens Sure, I just wonder if the way to fully maximise the performance/file size of a font is to have a good understanding of font technology and use a tool like FontLab?

Ollie Williams Just van Rossum Roel Nieskens I don't understand what using FontLab is doing here.

一丝 Just van Rossum Roel Nieskens My understanding of font technology isn’t great. I’m just asking the question. I guess it is possible for a font to be badly engineered or well engineered github.com/harfbuzz/borin…