Fluid font project proposal

[Jonathan Hung]

Hi everyone,

In the Fluid project, we have been using font icons widely in our UI's over
the past year. Currently, when a project needs icons we:

   - duplicate a font from another project;
   - create a new font from scratch;
   - or mix-and-match existing glyphs with new glyphs by either importing
   multiple fonts in the markup, or by creating another font set that contains
   all the glyphs.

The unintended consequence is that this creates a maintenance issue when
designing, deploying, and using icon fonts.

Dana, Justin and I discussed this and would like to put forth the following
proposal for discussion:

   1. Create a new repository on github which stores SVG files used to
   generate fonts.
   2. Use a grunt plugin (like grunt-webfont
   <https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-webfont>) that generates fonts from
   SVGs

Using github helps solve the maintenance issue, and the grunt plugin helps
with the deployment of fonts.

This system should also be able to handle generation of multiple icon sets
from a configuration file, and allow users to specify their own Unicode
PUAs (the unique IDs used in CSS to reference a specific glyph) so that
icons have predictable and stable implementation in deployment. We will
need to investigate these requirements more closely.

I have filed this issue / proposal under
http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-5555

If a reasonable solution can be found, a similar approach could be
implemented in other projects.

We welcome your comments.

- Jon.

-- 

*JONATHAN HUNG*

INCLUSIVE DESIGNER, IDRC



*T:* 416 977 6000 x3951

*F:* 416 977 9844

*E:* jhung at ocadu.ca



*OCAD UNIVERSITY*

Inclusive Design Research Centre

205 Richmond Street W, Toronto, ON, M5V 1V3



www.ocadu.ca

www.idrc.ocad.ca
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.idrc.ocad.ca/pipermail/fluid-work/attachments/20141113/90271e33/attachment.htm>