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Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Font Icons in Android Apps

While vector graphics implementation is moving quite slowly, there is another interesting development in the similar direction. The point in question being avoiding multiple different sizes of images and using one image that scales well. This can be achieved only with vector images and, as mentioned, direct support for SVG is quite slow. The alternative is coming from the world of web applications.
Font Awesome, for example, is a great way of using a custom font that contains icons instead of letters. That way, icons can be drawn anywhere in a very simple way. They scale well, and their colour can be customized. They are monochrome, with one colour available for the icon content and, being usually transparent, another one is available as the background colour.
This is quite enough for most purposes. It is very light on resources and easy to implement.

Here are a few links to articles and the library that allows the same for Android apps.
The implementation is quite easy and this represent the easiest way to use scalable graphics in Android apps so far.

Below are some useful services that allow operations on icon fonts:

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