But the above trick is fiddly at best, down right impossible at worst. Goodness knows I can’t remember all the Font Awesome icons I’ve used and where in my document!
My WISH LIST request is to have Blocs do the icon font filesize slimming for us automatically. Simply put, I want Blocs to consider which Font Awesome icons I use, then when I export my website, Blocs will save Font Awesome font files that include ONLY the icons I am using in my current Blocs document. That will make Font Awesome font sizes awesome.
If this cannot be implemented, then my alternate request is to have Blocs show me all the Font Awesome icons currently in use throughout my entire document so I can actually use the above 7 steps to create a slim version of Font Awesome myself.
Probably the best way would be if Blocs would allow you to import your own icon fonts (just like your own web fonts), then you could use your own compiled icon font. I think we already had this discussion before, and it’s probably not that easy to implement.
You can already import svg icons yourself and add them to your site as graphic files via the asset manager. The trick is to only add the ones you want. This can also be done with the font awesome icons that can be downloaded directly.
The point of my Wish List is to make the process faster and easier to the point of us as Blocs users not needing to think about it at all. We all want to have the means of just double-clicking that icon box in Blocs, change the icon to whatever we want, then just export our site and let Blocs do all the work, knowing Blocs will keep file sizes as small as possible. Doing the manual labor yourself takes time and is not convenient. You might even change your mind at some point and want to swap out icons, but then it becomes a heck of a lot more work. Anything that can accelerate our work saves us time, and time is money.
Most of us don’t have time to do all the manual labor. Goodness knows I don’t. So I just ignore the huge file sizes for now and upload FontAwesome in its bloated unawesomeness. I don’t want it to remain that way forever though.
I realize Norm has a lot on his plate. I create each Wish List request with zero expectations. I can only say what I feel and hope a little it comes to pass eventually. I did that with Freeway a lot back in the day! But even when the improvements didn’t come, I stuck with the app until the very end. The same is true of my current love for Blocs. There are workarounds now, to be sure. But there’s always a better way. Having this work automated would be a great help to everyone who uses Blocs insofar as everyone probably has used at least 1 icon. It’s not a design consideration as much as a file size consideration. Making sites load faster (for people who visit them for the first time and don’t have resources cached) is an important consideration. That’s what my Wish List is all about.
But even when the improvements didn’t come, I stuck with the app until the very end. The same is true of my current love for Blocs. There are workarounds now, to be sure. But there’s always a better way. Having this work automated would be a great help to everyone who uses Blocs insofar as everyone probably has used at least 1 icon. It’s not a design consideration as much as a file size consideration. Making sites load faster (for people who visit them for the first time and don’t have resources cached) is an important consideration. That’s what my Wish List is all about.