An icon font is a font that contains Icon as character.
Using web font to show graphics. It is very convenient from a development perspective.
You can :
Designer designs the icons. Each pictogram has been drawn for pixel perfection at a size of 20 x 20 pixels. The icons are created in a vector format (Svg)
Multiple icons are turned into fonts. Most projects make use of maybe ten, twenty pictograms and a font containing all pictograms is then unnecessary large.
Deciding on which unicode position to use for each glyph is a huge task and also a source of great debate.
Mapping icons:
A important issue occurs when the icon fonts come pre-mapped to letters. So in the worse case, they can be read outloud by screen readers.
There are four font formats are required for web:
The eot and woff formats are just containers for ttf
Professional (and open source, free) icon fonts:
Editor are not convenient for automated font processing.
<h2 id="stats">
<span aria-hidden="true" data-icon="⇝"></span>
Stats
</h2>
[data-icon]:before {
font-family: icons; /* Icon font, */
content: attr(data-icon);
speak: none; /* ???*/
}
<a href="#rss" class="icon-alone">
<span aria-hidden="true" data-icon="▨"></span>
<span class="screen-reader-text">RSS</span>
</a>
.icon-alone {
display: inline-block; /* Fix for clickability issue in WebKit */
}
.screen-reader-text { /* Reusable, toolbox kind of class */
position: absolute;
top: -9999px;
left: -9999px;
}