Keep old (1.0) icons, too

[rainboxx]

Hey,

thanks for all the work! We're using your Icons at http://unusuals.net a lot. I was very excited to upgrade to 2.0 and use a lot more icons, and had time to do so today.

Unfortunately most 1.0 icons has also changed, so we're unable to upgrade. Icons like icon-user are looking weird now, like a Playmobil figure instead of a human. I can also see that icon-random has changed so that both lines are glued together at smaller font-sizes. There are similar changes to almost any other icon, too.

We're using icons from Glyphicons for our iOS app which do look completely different now. We would have to draw the icons by ourself and update the app, which we cannot do ATM.

So this is a feature request to re-add the 1.0 icons again, maybe as an extended font. I could think of many other users that have the same issues but couldn't find tickets about this topic yet. I know we can stay at 1.0 but we'd have no additional icons nor benefit from other improvements.

Thank you very much!

[kremalicious]

Those font files are still in the repository, that's the point of git. If you want the 1.0 font files just go back in time to the last commit before the 2.0 push and get them from there. Putting them alongside the new versions would be very confusing, especially for new users.

[rainboxx]

@kremalicious It's not that I want the old ones alone, I wanted to use the new icons but have the old icons, which are already in use by some people, too.

[kremalicious]

Just like Twitter Bootstrap, making everything backwards compatible isn't a goal here. What you want to do is a very special case and can easily be accomplished by yourself with what's already there:

1. Get the 1.0 font, suffix it with -old or something
2. Put an .old class to all your icons in the HTML where you want them to come from the 1.0 font
3. Make an additional @font-face rule in the css, defining the font as FontAwesomeOld or something
4. Define this as font-family in a new selector targeting your .old class, like [class^="old icon-"]:before
5. Profit!

[rainboxx]

Yes, I can do that.

I still wonder why these icons changed, since they were built as a replacement for the Glyphicons, which now look different.

[bugpowder]

@kremalicious are you speaking on behalf of the FortAwesome project or just as an individual?

Because the tone in your responses seems authoritative ("making everything backwards compatible isn't a goal here"), which I'm not sure is the case.

The thing is, glyphs ideally should not change appearance between releases, especially is said releases add more glyphs one might like to use and fix bugs. I would very much like to use v 2.0 and have it be a drop-in replacement for 1.0, and use the new fonts, but I can't because icons I already use from 1.0 now look differently. Yes, I could go to all the hoopla and backport old fonts -- but then again I could also do my own icon font from scratch. Isn't convenience the point of something like Font Awesome?

If you cannot understand why icons with the same name should not change appearance, then either you're not in the web design business or shouldn't be.

[rainboxx]

@bugpowder Should we start a branch of Font-Awesome with old and new icons combined? ;-) If I'd new how to make those font files... I would.

[bugpowder]

@rainboxx well, we could.

A problem is that we would have to rename the v1 or v2 files that have clashing names, so having old+new items combined would not be a drop-in replacement.

It would have been better if initially the redesigned icons where using a different suffix (e.g icon-foo2).

Keeping them all in and giving them different names or suffixes would also make sense in the future, if the ability to create custom subsets of Font Awesome is implemented as stated in the roadmap. Then the extra size of having the old versions of the icons around would not matter, since you'll be able to trim the icons you don't use.