Memba Web Fonts

Some icons we needed for the Memba platform.

Why Memba Web Fonts?

• Because of high density (retina) displays, we have decided to use font icons for all small monochrome icons displayed in menus and buttons (we use SVG otherwise);
• At some point we were loading bootstrap glyphicons and Font Awesome to only display a few icons, which is far from optimal.
• We wanted our font icons to match the style of our SVG polychrome icons so we have licensed IconExperience.com O-Collection.

Tools to convert SVG files into Web Fonts

There are online and offline tools. Amongst the online tools, the most comprehensive seems to be Icomoon. They also have a browser app. Although there are scripts, often based on Fontforge, we have turned to grunt tasks and we have evaluated:

• grunt-fontsmith which uses icomoon.io;
• grunt-webfont which is uses fontforge on OSX and a custom node engine on windows.

We have settled on grunt-webfont for its architecture, developer commitment, reviews and much richer options.

Preparing SVG icons for processing with grunt-webfont

The conversion of the O-Collection SVG icons initially failed with all platforms cited above. It seems these tools do not like the width and height of 1024px with a viewBox of 0 0 10240 10240.

All files have to be opened in Adobe Illustrator and saved as to be fixed. In the SVG Options dialog, click More Options and uncheck Responsive as described here.

Some files like add.svg, alarm_clock.svg, find-again.svg, home.svg, question.svg, ... miss cutout details when converted as fonts. These details are displayed in browsers but not displayed in Adobe Illustrator either. To reveal these details:

1. Open the SVG file in Adobe Illustrator CC 2014 and show the Pathfinder window: menu Window -> Pathfinder or Shift+Ctrl+F9
2. Select one such detail in Adobe Illustrator
3. In the contextual menu select Release Compound Path
4. Click the outer shape (black) and shift click the detail (inner shape, also black)
5. In the Pathfinder window, click the exclude icon (the inner shape is now white)
6. The detail is revealed (inner shape cut out from black outer shape).

In some instances, the artboard needs to be resized (1024px x 1024px) which can be achiveed through Document Setup then press Esc to exit the artboard. Then the icon needs to be aligned (horizontally and vertically) to the artboard. To achieve that, the align window (menu Window --> Align or Shift+F7) has an align tool at the bottom right corner which offers the option to Align to artboard. Toggle the double-arrow button on the Align tab to display teh Align tool.

Use of generated web fonts

• http://www.fontspring.com/blog/smoother-rendering-in-chrome-update
• http://www.fontspring.com/blog/fixing-ie9-font-face-problems
• http://www.fontspring.com/blog/further-hardening-of-the-bulletproof-syntax
• http://www.fontspring.com/support/installing_webfonts/font-face-bugs

Origin of icons and licensing

All icons except social sharing icons are licensed from Incors. Social sharing icons are licensed from @iconmonstr

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