Hi Colin, Great feedback and suggestions. I am going to include the criteria and tools I have used, and everything that I have came across that might be useful on this research. I am also going to look into the internationalization issue, and find answers for the questions that are brought up.
Thanks Arash On 2013-03-24, at 2:45 PM, Colin Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Arash, > > Thanks for this summary. It looks like this could be a very useful idiom for > easily restyling icons, assuming we can resolve some of the issues you > mention below. > > I think it would be helpful for you to document the criteria that you've been > using to evaluate these font icon generation tools. Based on what you've > included in your JIRA, it seems that you're suggesting IcoMoon as the best > tool, but I can't tell what criteria you've used to determine that. You > mention something about an "offline application," but I'm unclear why, > specifically, that is an advantage. You also mention that FontForge is "not > as user-friendly," but again I'm unclearly about why that is, specifically. > > Typically, for a research task like this, you'd create a JIRA that describes > the goals and criteria for the research. The title might be something to the > effect of "Research the viability of using icon fonts in UI Options in order > to simplify the styling process." And then, in the body of the JIRA, you'd > describe the following things: > > 1. Why we might want to consider doing this (I think you do a good job of > this) > 2. The tools you've found so far that might be useful > 3. The criteria you will use to evaluate these tools > > As far as the issue with IE8/9, I notice that Justin mentioned that there may > be some way to polyfill > (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7087331/what-is-the-meaning-of-polyfills-in-html5) > this missing functionality using JavaScript. That's certainly something we > should investigate. > > The internationalization issue is a big one: if we can't provide a viable > means for internationalization, we can't use this technique. UI Options has > already been translated in to English, German, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic. > We're only going to have more languages in the future. > > It sounds like, at minimum, localizers would be required to generate their > own version of icon font that was bound to ligatures in the native language. > Do any of the font generation tools provide any support for this process? How > would we, at runtime, link to a particular language-specific version of the > icon font? > > I hope this helps, > > Colin > > --- > Colin Clark > http://fluidproject.org > > On 2013-03-21, at 1:48 PM, "Sadr, Arash" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Everyone, >> >> We had a community workshop discussion a few weeks ago about font icons and >> talked about few options (e.g Font Awesome, IcoMoon, symbolset), and decided >> to explore them more. >> >> Creating icons is fairly easy, and there are a lot of free font-icon sets >> online. The issue is not the icons, but an application that gives us the >> ability to create a font out of our icons, and a way to create metadata such >> as ligatures for them. >> >> The reason why we think Icomoon http://icomoon.io/ is our best option for >> now, is because it provides us with a free offline application that gives us >> the ability to add our own icons (vectors) to their free icon sets. It also >> gives us the option to create ligatures for those icons. >> >> I have created a JIRA “Using Icomoon to create font-icons to be used as >> icons and elements for UI options” >> (http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-4934) about this, and have >> added some questions and thoughts. >> Using Font icons is great because we can easily: >> • Change the size and color - Shadow their shape >> • Have different icon sizes in the same font >> • Do everything image based icons can do, like change opacity or >> rotate. >> • Add strokes to them with text-stroke or add gradients/textures with >> background-clip: text; >> • Convert them to text >> >> We are also going to have some drawbacks: >> • We cannot have two-toned icons. >> • We cannot have other languages in metadata, and space is not allowed >> between the words in the metadata. >> • Alignment could become an issue >> • IE8 and IE9 do not support font-icons with ligatures. >> >> At this point, I have a few questions that I think need to be answered >> before we could explore further: >> >> >> • Can we fix the issue with IE8 and IE9? >> • What happens if we could not find a way around IE8 and IE9? >> • Do we support other language and text inputs, and would it be a >> problem if we could not use them? >> • Are ligatures going to work with screen readers in our supported >> browsers? >> >> >> I have created a font icon pack with ligatures, including some of our icons >> that you could download from the JIRA and play around with. I also have >> attached an image, showing icons as fonts, and their abilities. >> >> It would be great to hear your feedback and thoughts on this issue, and also >> on the JIRA, since it is my first one. >> >> Arash >> >> _______________________________________________________ >> fluid-work mailing list - [email protected] >> To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, >> see http://lists.idrc.ocad.ca/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work > _______________________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://lists.idrc.ocad.ca/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
