Swift
Auto-generated icon font library for iOS [beta]

Iconic will help you make icon fonts integration on iOS easy and effortless. Its main component is in charge of auto-generating strongly typed code in Swift, fully compatible with Objective-C, allowing the integration of vector icons as image or text in your apps.

You will interact with an auto-generated class under the name of {FontName}Icon.swift, which is a light abstraction of the Iconic.swift class. For more information, have a look at how to install and how to use.

Note: This library hasn't yet been used in production. Consider it in beta!

Why Icon Fonts

Web developers have been using icon fonts for quite some time now. It's really, really great!

There are many advantages of using icon fonts on iOS:

• Resolution independent: scale and tint without quality loss.
• Automatically scaled for different screen densities.
• Work with (way) less image files.
• Improve visual consistency.
• Platform agnostic.
• Add better UI accessibility.
• Simple to work with.

Think about the power of rendering vector icons, natively!

Great. Now, how do I create an icon font, you say?

• You can ask your nearest friendly designer! Making an icon font isn't that hard, specially if you already have the assets.
• There are many open sourced icon fonts out there (most are available under the SIL Open Font License). They are designed for the web but they are still very useful for iOS.
• You can read this article and give fontastic.me a shot.
• Check out the icon fonts available in this repo.

Key Features

• Very easy to install with CocoaPods.
• Compatible with Swift and Objective-C.
• Supports TTF and OTF font files.
• Auto-generates enums and unicodes mapping, out of the font's PUA range.
• NSAttributedString and UIImage outputs.
• Fonts are registered dynamically, effortless. No need to import the file to your project.
• UIKit extensions (UIBarButtonItem and UITabBarItem).
• Auto-generated icon font html catalog.
• iOS 8, and tvOS 9 or later.

Note: Some open sourced icon fonts don't include the names of each of their glyphs. This could result in a non-descriptive enum, which can make things less intuitive for you when using Iconic. If you create your own icon font, make sure to properly name each glyph.

Missing Features in Beta

• Allow rectangular icon glyphs (right now, the lib assumes they're all square sized).
• Provide OSS icon fonts with fully named glyphs for better usability.

Installation

Via CocoaPods

FONT_PATH='path_to_your_icon_font.ttf' pod install Iconic

When using the FONT_PATH environment variable, it will install Iconic with your icon font and auto-generate all files with its name.

You should then see a similar setup like this:

pod install Iconic

Will install Iconic with its default font, FontAwesome.

Under the hood

When installing Iconic, several things are happening under the hood:

• After the Iconic repo is cloned, a custom version of SwiftGen is downloaded along with its dependencies.
• Before pods are installed, SwiftGen is compiled
• Iconizer is ran, executing SwiftGen using a custom stencil for Iconic.
• SwiftGen does its magic, detecting all unicodes from the PUA range of the provided font file, extracting their unicode values as well as their glyph names. All this data is then used for auto-generating a Switft class of name {FontName}Icon.swift; a json file is also exported afterwards.
• Once everything is exported, an HTML icon font catalog is also created.
  

There is a known bug where sometimes, calling pod install Iconic would not run correctly SwiftGen an retrieve all the icon unicode from a font. If this happens to you, make sure to call pod update Iconic to retrigger SwiftGen.

Result

This is how the module ouput is going to look like (plus documentation, which has been removed for this example). Notice that API names are adopting the font's file name to make it easy to work with, and everything is strongly typed, making it safe and auto-completable.

How to use

For complete documentation, visit CocoaPods' auto-generated docs.

Import

In Objective-C, you will need to import the Iconic module:

@import Iconic;

Registering the icon font

Registration is required to activate Iconic. You shall do this once, when launching your application. Internally, the icon mapping is retrieved and kept in memory during the application's life term.

Iconic provides a convenient way to register the icon font: Note: the method name may change depending of your icon font's name:

Iconic.registerFontAwesomeIcon()

You can also register the font with its family name and unicode mapping:

Iconic.registerFont("FontAwesome", map: FontAwesomeIconMap)

Use as images

You can construct an UIImage instance out of a font's icon and tint it. This may be very convenient for integrating with existing UIKit controls which expect UIImage objects already.

let image = Iconic.imageForFontAwesomeIcon(.CaretRight, size: 16, color: self.view.tintColor)
let imageView = UIImageView(image: image)

Images are created using NSStringDraw APIs to render a UIImage out of an NSAttributedString.

Use as attributed strings

You may need to icons as text too, to simplify your layout work. For example, instead of having an image and a label, you can combined it all in one single label:

let iconString = Iconic.attributedStringForFontAwesomeIcon(.Home, size: 20, color: .orangeColor())

let attributes = [NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.orangeColor(),
                  NSFontAttributeName: UIFont.boldSystemFontOfSize(20)]

let labelString = NSMutableAttributedString(string: "  Home", attributes: attributes)
labelString.insertAttributedString(iconString!, atIndex: 0)

let label = UILabel()
label.attributedText = labelString
label.sizeToFit()

Use as unicode string

Ultimately, you may need to retrieve the unicode string representation on an icon to do more advanced things:

let unicode = Iconic.unicodeStringForFontAwesomeIcon(.Apple)

Use its font object

For further customization, you may need to use the UIFont object instead:

let font = Iconic.fontAwesomeIconFontOfSize(20)

UIKit Extensions

UIKit extensions are also included, just to make your code look simpler:

// UITarbBarItem
let tabItem = UITabBarItem(fontAwesomeIcon: .Book, size:20, title: "Book", tag: 0)

// UIBarButtonItem
let buttonItem = UIBarButtonItem(fontAwesomeIcon: .Book, size:20, target: self, action: #selector(didTapButton))

// UIButton
let button = UIButton(type: .System)
button.setFontAwesomeIcon(.Code, size: 20, forState: .Normal)

Sample Project

Check out the sample project, everything is demo'd there.

Icon Font Catalog

Besides the auto-generated Swift code, you will notice a catalog.html file being added to your directory. This is your icon font catalog, to be used for visual reference about all the icons you have available.

Note: if you are using Chrome as your default browser, you will need to restart it using the open -a 'Google Chrome' --args -allow-file-access-from-files in the command line to be able to open view the catalog. This is because the html's javascript loads a local json file and Chrome has built-in security features to disable it.

Thanks to

• Olivier Halligon for building and sharing SwiftGen. Such a great tool!
• The CocoaPods team for always being so responsive and helpful.
• Dave Gandy for making FontAwesome so awesome.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT License.

SwiftGen is licensed under the MIT License.

The Font Awesome font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License