Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by philippK 5209 days ago
There was an article posted here 1 day ago that explored to great lengths why SVG for scalable icons sounds good in theory - but does not work well in practice. And why icon fonts are the way to go for now. See here: http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...

Key point: SVG icons don't actually scale that well because SVG lacks hinting.

1 comments

No, the point of that piece was not that icon fonts are the way to go. It was that one vector icon can't just be rendered at different resolutions without changing the level of detail, and most icon designers use vectors to render their large sizes, but often resort to manual bitmap pixel pushing at smaller sizes to get the look they want.

The key point is that you need to design different vectors or bitmaps for different actual rendered sizes, with different levels of detail, and one design will never be suitable for all sizes.