Use OTF instead of TTF to get smaller font files

FortAwesome / Font-Awesome

The iconic SVG, font, and CSS toolkit

https://fontawesome.com

Other

73.7k stars 12.19k forks source link

Use OTF instead of TTF to get smaller font files #10319

Closed RoelN closed 3 weeks ago

RoelN commented 7 years ago

Currently Font Awesome offers an OTF file (presumably for "desktop use") and TTF-based webfonts (TTF, WOFF and WOFF2). TrueType fonts are generally larger than OpenType/CFF fonts, so why not use the OTF file? More about difference between TT and OT/CFF

(Maybe related: a quick inspection of differences between the OTF and TTF is that the OTF is outdated and misses icons, is that possible?)

Edit: I have some more suggestions for optimising Font Awesome's font files, so if you have any questions or need any help, ping me!

tagliala commented 7 years ago

From the author of IcoMoon:

I added OTF support (CFF outlines, to be more precise) to IcoMoon in early 2014. Later that year, we received complaints from Windows users that their glyphs no longer looked crisp on IE and Firefox (which used DirectWrite). It turned out that DirectWrite on Windows did not render CFF glyphs properly. I resisted to change anything at first, but then Chrome 37 switched to using DirectWrite. I had to disable CFF and revert back to TTF.

Source: http://disq.us/p/1ec9228

RoelN commented 7 years ago

We checked, but this only seems to apply to Windows 7, and for a specific build of that Icomoon set. There's no reason OTF (CFF) should look bad in Windows — thousands of OTF fonts are in use on Windows without any problems.

Depending on your tools and your build process, it's very well possible to generate a nice and clean OTF font.

tagliala commented 7 years ago

@RoelN sorry, just saw your tweet

I cannot confirm that the .otf is outdated

Since .woff/.woff2/.svg/.ttf are generated via Font Squirrel at the moment (maybe things will change in FA 5.0), optimization of the other formats could be done in a separate project (eg: input .otf => output optimized .woff/.woff2/.otf/.ttf/.svg)

RoelN commented 7 years ago

@tagliala I didn't actually look at the icons, but saw the OTF wasn't updated in commit 1645c765d4b20c8e23b247f8a9ea5ba7da7b4627 and that it had 694 glyphs instead of the TTF's 707 (which is still more than the 675 icons claimed, by the way). Maybe some default glyphs (like .notdef) get added in the conversion process?

I'd be more than happy to discuss a pre/post-process setup to convert the source files to nice and clean font files!

tagliala commented 3 weeks ago

@talbs since FA7 will drop TTF and we provide an OTF for the Desktop, I would close this

Feel free to reopen