What is this
Icon Fonts are cool - Font Awesome/Foundation/Fontello/etc all have great-looking and well thought out icons.
font-blast can extract those cool icons from the font file, and create individual SVG/PNG files for every one of them.
Why?
- Use cool icons outside of web pages. If you have individual icons as SVGs, you can import them into Sketch, Illustrator, PowerPoint, or any other app to use for visual mockups/presentations.
- Modify & repackage icons. It's easy to change an individual SVG file, then repackage all images back into an icon-font (with e.g. Font Squirrel)
- Get high quality PNGs. Generate high-res PNGs with a transparent backgrounds to use in native applications, emails, etc.
Installation
Font-blast does not require PhantomJS or any other native binaries, so it should work pretty much everywhere.
Note: PNG images are generated with the embedded batik-rasterizer, and you will need have java installed to do that. Evil Java is not required for generating SVG files.
$ npm install font-blast
CLI usage
You can generate icons from the command line by called the script with two parameters: the SVG file of the font, and the directory where inidivual icons should be placed -
CLI
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/master/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.svg
$ bin/font-blast.js fontawesome-webfont.svg fa-icons/
Node
var fontBlast = require('font-blast');
fontBlast('font-awesome.svg', 'fa-icons');
Better Usage
Smarter filenames
Just using the SVG file it is impossible to tell what the icon represents. Most icon-fonts have a mapping table which gives a human-friendly name to each unicode symbol. See https://github.com/eugene1g/font-blast-examples