There's a great gem for using it with rails [1], a cli [2] and grunt task [2].
[1] https://github.com/railslove/fontello_rails_converter
pyftsubset FontAwesome.otf U+f0{2c,9e,99}
[1] https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/source/browse/...
- Sprockets asset pipeline integration https://github.com/glaszig/compass-fontcustom
- A PNG sprite compiler for compatibility with IE8, Win7/8 phones, and older versions of Android.
I can't say enough good things about these projects.
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
However, maybe it is just me, but I find this writing style irritating. I find it a little bit creepy when a product starts adressing me from a first person view.
This Android app I wrote serves the same purpose: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ly.jamie.fonta...
Source: https://github.com/jamiely/Font-Awesome-Browser-Android
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).
This seems better.
It's googlable.
It's unique.
It describes exactly what it does.
And if follows a huge tradition of x2y tools (pdf2text, etc etc).