rmm5t
commented
6 years ago font-awesome-rails is just a wrapper for the core FontAwesome resources. i.e. A subset of the raw font files cannot be applied programmatically from these static resources.
However, you can build your own version of FA by following these instructions: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/wiki/Customize-Font-Awesome
This somewhat defeats the purpose of using font-awesome-rails, but, in theory, if you're also able to take the newly generated font assets and get them in front of the asset path such that font_path prefers them over the assets included with this gem, you might be able to fully accomplish what you're after.
https://github.com/bokmann/font-awesome-rails/blob/master/app/assets/stylesheets/font-awesome.css.erb#L7-L15
Overall, this is all currently outside the scope of gem; however, if there's something we can add to the included stylesheet here that would make it easier to reference customized font assets, I'd be willing to review a PR for that.
My application only uses a few symbols from font awesome, and the font is one of the largest required components in the critical path.
It'd be great if I could just list the symbols I want, and font-awesome-rails would then create a subset file with ONLY those fonts. I imagine that there's a way to do that using the Rails asset pipeline, but I didn't see simple step-by-step instructions on how to do this.
There may not even need to be any more code; this may be just "please document step-by-step instructions on how to do this". I imagine many people only use a small subset of font awesome, and since fonts are typically on the critical path for display, it's nice to make them smaller.
Thanks so much!!