From the course: Deploying Icon Fonts for the Web

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Understanding encoding

Understanding encoding

From the course: Deploying Icon Fonts for the Web

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Understanding encoding

Deploying icon fonts in your projects is not always a straight forward process. Not all icon fonts are created the same, and because of this, you'll have to know certain things about your icon font before you start to use it. The main thing you have to understand is how the font is encoded. When an icon font is created, icon are stored within glyphs and encoded to specific Unicode characters. Think of it this way, if you took a font like, say, Verdana and removed the artwork for the j character and replaced it with an icon. Well, that means that any time somebody typed in a j and used the Verdana font, they'd see an icon instead. So, in order to use an icon font, you have to know where the icons are stored inside of it. A growing trend among icon fonts is to store icons within what is known as the private use area. Now, this is an area of the Unicode standard that's set aside for custom glyphs. Of course, this isn't the only encoding strategy for icon fonts. So, I'm going to show you…

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