gulp-iconfont

Create a SVG/TTF/EOT/WOFF font from several SVG icons with Gulp.

You can test this library with the frontend generator.

Usage

First, install gulp-iconfont as a development dependency:

npm install --save-dev gulp-iconfont

Then, add it to your gulpfile.js:

var iconfont = require('gulp-iconfont');

gulp.task('Iconfont', function(){
  gulp.src(['assets/icons/*.svg'])
    .pipe(iconfont({
      fontName: 'myfont', // required
      appendCodepoints: true // recommended option
    }))
      .on('codepoints', function(codepoints, options) {
        // CSS templating, e.g.
        console.log(codepoints, options);
      })
    .pipe(gulp.dest('www/fonts/'));
});

gulp-iconfont bundles several plugins to bring a simpler API (gulp-svgicons2svgfont, gulp-svg2tff, gulp-ttf2eot, gulp-ttf2woff) for more flexibility, feel free to use them separately.

If some font glyphs aren't converted properly you should append the normalize:true option and a fontHeight greater than 1000 (fontHeight: 1001)

Make your CSS

To use this font in your CSS, you could add a mixin like in this real world example. You can also generate your CSS automatically with gulp-iconfont-css.

It's also easy to make a CSS template by yourself. Like this example, gulp-consolidate is useful to handling such a template.

var gulp = require('gulp');
var iconfont = require('gulp-iconfont');
var consolidate = require('gulp-consolidate');

gulp.task('Iconfont', function(){
  gulp.src(['assets/icons/*.svg'])
    .pipe(iconfont({ fontName: 'myfont' }))
    .on('codepoints', function(codepoints, options) {
      gulp.src('templates/myfont.css')
        .pipe(consolidate('lodash', {
          glyphs: codepoints,
          fontName: 'myfont',
          fontPath: '../fonts/',
          className: 's'
        }))
        .pipe(gulp.dest('www/css/'));
    })
    .pipe(gulp.dest('www/fonts/'));
});

Font hinting

You may also want to hint your TTF fonts, you can use gulp-spawn, gulp-filter and ttfautohint for that matter. First install ttfautohint (use at least the 0.93 version), then, in your gulpfile:

var ttfFilter = filter('*.ttf');

  gulp.src(['assets/icons/*.svg'])
  .pipe(iconfont(/* ... */))
  .pipe(ttfFilter)
  .pipe(spawn({
    cmd: '/bin/sh',
    args: [
      '-c',
      'cat | ttfautohint /dev/stdin /dev/stdout | cat'
    ]
  }))
  .pipe(ttfFilter.restore())
  .pipe(gulp.dest('www/fonts/'))

Issues

Add issues to the right repos:

the plugin doesn't work at all, submit your issue in this repo.
every fonts doens't display as expected: submit the issue to the svgicons2svgfont repository.
only some fonts are damaged? Please look at the font format the targeted browser actually use and then, submit you issue to one of those projects: svg2ttf, ttf2eot, ttf2woff.

API

iconfont(options)

options.*

The svgicons2svgfont are available:

options.fontName
options.fixedWidth
options.centerHorizontally
options.normalize
options.fontHeight
options.descent
options.log

So are the gulp-svgicons2svgfont:

options.appendCodepoints

Preparing SVG's

Beware that your SVG icons must have a high enough height. 500 is a minimum. If you do not want to resize them, you can try to combine the fontHeight and the normalize option to get them in a correct size.

Inkscape

Degroup every shapes (Ctrl+Shift+G), convert to pathes (Ctrl+Maj+C) and merge them (Ctrl++). Then save you SVG, prefer 'simple SVG' file type.

Illustrator

Save your file as SVG with the following settings:

SVG Profiles: SVG 1.1
Fonts Type: SVG
Fonts Subsetting: None
Options Image Location: Embed
Advanced Options
- CSS Properties: Presentation Attributes
- Decimal Places: 1
- Encoding: UTF-8
- Output fewer elements: check

Leave the rest unchecked.

More in-depth information: http://www.adobe.com/inspire/2013/09/exporting-svg-illustrator.html

Sketch

Sketch is a relatively new drawing tool on Mac. With help of Sketch Tools and gulp-sketch, you can directly create fonts from your Sketch file. No need to export intermediate SVGs.

Here is a sample repo "Symbols for Sketch".

Download the zipped repo and extract it.
Go to the directory. $ cd path/to/dir
Install some tools. $ npm install
Create fonts and CSS $ gulp symbols

Contributing

Feel free to push your code if you agree with publishing under the MIT license.

shonny-ua/gulp-iconfont