Use an ICOMoon generated icon font in your IOS app!

Font-awesome and other icon fonts are just awesome. ICOMoon (a web app that lets you hand pick glyphs from multiple icon fonts and generate a custom font file that contains only the selected glyphs) is beyond awesome!

Here is how I use that stuff in my apps:

• Go here: http://icomoon.io/app/
• Select icons from various font
• Click the Font button at the bottom to generate the font
• click download

For instance the sample font in the repo was generated by picking 5 icons from 5 different fonts, and it is only 3KB (font-awesome alone is 65KB):

• Extract the zip and go to the fonts sub-folder.
• Run the generateHeader.py python script provided in the repo...

This script will parse the icomoon.dev.svg file and create a new file named IcomoonIcons.h. This is hard-codedin the python script. The generated files contains a bunch of #defines in it, one UTF code per glyph.

For instance, the previous icon set will generate these 5 #defines:

#define  ICOMOON_BUBBLES "\uE000"
#define  ICOMOON_TARGET "\uE001"
#define  ICOMOON_SNOWY "\uE002"
#define  ICOMOON_MUSIC "\uF001"
#define  ICOMOON_CHART "\uE003"

• Add the IcomoonIcons.h file and the ttf font file icomoon.ttf in your app project.
• Make sure your add an entry in your app info.plist for the icomoon.ttf font file ("Fonts provided by application"/UIAppFonts row).
• Optionaly, add the IcoMoon.m and IcoMoon.h to your project. This class is a very simple class that imports the generated IcomoonIcons.h and that contains only one helper method:

+(NSString *)iconString:(char *)icon
{
    NSString *string = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:icon];
    return string;
}

you could go by without it really, I just find

[NSString stringWithUTF8String:ICOMOON_BUBBLES];

not as readable as

[IcoMoon iconString:ICOMOON_BUBBLES];

In your app, you can now simply make a UILabel look like an icon:

[self.label setFont:[UIFont fontWithName:@"icomoon" size:64.0f]];
self.label.text = [IcoMoon iconString:ICOMOON_BUBBLES];

The key thing is to set the font to @"icomoon"... Alternatively if you are using NUI as I am:

Label:BigIcon {
    font-name: icomoon;
    font-size: 64;
    text-align: center;
}

Run the ExampleApp iPhone app to see it in action.

I guess you could make the generation of the IcomoonIcons.h file a custom build phase so everything is updated after you update the font... Feel free to send me a pull request!