Show HN: Font Awesome to PNG (opens in new tab)

Font icons are scalable too, which makes it really easy to change the icon size on the fly. Since I do all of my development directly in the browser, I never know how big I need my icons until I've done some experimenting with different sizes. Font icons make this experimentation process a lot easier because I don't need to update an image file. I can just change the font-size property in css.

It's incredibly convenient not to have to generate multiple sizes of icon/pictograms for a project. Beyond even just needing multiple sizes for different uses (a list vs a header) - with the advent of high dpi mobile screens you'll also need to re-generate all of the images in @2x versions if you want the images to not look fuzzy.

Beyond that, there is now a whole ecosystem of addons that make use of the library

One of several different icon pickers: http://victor-valencia.github.io/bootstrap-iconpicker/

Leaflet Map Markers: https://github.com/lvoogdt/Leaflet.awesome-markers

1 - BootstrapCDN will even host it for you: http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/#fontawesome_tab

'Why' was the first thing I was thinking but apparently offensive!

  It's googlable.

  It's unique.

  It describes exactly what it does.

  And if follows a huge tradition of x2y tools (pdf2text,      etc etc).

From an perfectionist perspective - a font is a font, those were made for text. They're used for icons just because it's widely supported option that allows arbitrary coloring and scaling - so when one need a red 0.6cm-sized icon, they get it with a simple directive.

SVG is a graphic format that also has such possibilities while being more semantically correct by not even slightly abusing text (even though icon fonts generally use that private Unicode area).