There's a better way

[pirj]

I think there's a better way for fontawesome to be used in terminal. Just install FontAwesome.otf file and fix .Xresources:

*faceName: inconsolata, font-awesome

No need to patch existing fonts. No need to support them all (there are ~30 popular terminal fonts).

[gabrielelana]

Thank you, I didn't know that you could have fallbacks I will try that for sure :smile:

However there's a problem: many symbol fonts share the same unicode section (mainly the E000-F8FF aka the "Private Use Area") and so the fallback strategy wouldn't work :disappointed:

Of course if you want to use only one symbol font, or if you create your symbol font with something like http://fontello.com, your solution will work better than patching

Questions: do you use that strategy? Are you happy with the result? Symbol glyphs are rendered "correctly"? Can we see a screenshot?

[pirj]

Here you go http://oi41.tinypic.com/153wbja.jpg I've removed that stuff from .Xresources and it still works. Yep, clashes may happen, but font-awesome plays well with your Pomicons font (thank you for that font BTW!). I have found all this couple hours ago, but pretty happy with how it goes.

Check out screenshot's bottom right, that's a modification of Font Awesome's cheatsheet page: http://sprunge.us/eFTc (check out @font-face), it needs a link to TTF file. Probably it makes sense to add this to Pomicons's readme so that people may cut'n'paste chars from readme to wherever they want.

[gabrielelana]

I've removed that stuff from .Xresources and it still works.

I (finally) found out how things works. Yes you're right xft does have a fallback mechanism but by default you don't know witch font will be selected as a fallback for a particular code point (that's why some glyphs are not displayed in your screenshot). I found a complete solution here, you can read the conversation that led to the solution here

I will update the README with this informations, I guess that the merge it's pretty useless (I've always felt it like a bit of an hack) but maybe I can turn it in a relocation script for glyphs to avoid clashes

Yep, clashes may happen, but font-awesome plays well with your Pomicons font (thank you for that font BTW!).

You're welcome, glad you like it :smile:

Check out screenshot's bottom right, that's a modification of Font Awesome's cheatsheet page: http://sprunge.us/eFTc (check out @font-face), it needs a link to TTF file. Probably it makes sense to add this to Pomicons's readme so that people may cut'n'paste chars from readme to wherever they want

I will do that

Thank you again for your contribution :smile:

[pirj]

Thanks for digging for an explanation how that works!

[gabrielelana]

Implemented the fallback strategy in place of the patching strategy

[pirj]

Wicked!