New FontAwesome5 Subsetting App available

FA have just announced a desktop subsetting App for Pro users. This will allow you to use only the icons that you want to use and save downloading 1000’s of icons you don’t need. Or to put this another way, get rid of the icons you don’t want. This can drastically reduce the huge download size of FA5 icons.

Pro users will need to enable Beta testing to show the download in Downloads - Other Downloads.

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I just tried this out and it is very straight forward. I created a subset buy selecting all Angle and Plus icons for all 4 FA5 sets, and it created a folder of all the required files. The woff files created were only 2kb and the woff2 were only 1kb each. As these are pretty much the only FA symbols that I use, this is a worthy reduction in file size.

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Where do you find that app? I assume you are referring to NPM…but when I google it I can’t find a download link anywhere…

I have been using Nucleo, which is great…but not sure it is the optimal way to keep the FA5 Pro account up to date???

It’s only available as a beta at the moment, if you’ve got a Font Awesome account, and FA5 licence I presume.

Nucleo is for vector icon management, font subsetting is a very different thing. Instead of loading a complete font file with all characters, subsetting allows you to pick only those you use to create a smaller and faster loading font file.

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You need a Pro FA5 account. These were available for only $20 during the early crowd funding FA5 phase, but I think they are $99 per year now. That $20 bought you a lifetime Pro membership amongst other things and allowed you to download the whole FA5 set in icons in light, medium, solid and brands, and just for the SVG versions, was a great deal for $20. With the Pro membership you can download the Subsetting tool from the FA Downloads page (but must enable beta downloads, to see the download).

However, I find myself not using FA icons much or hardly at all, these days. I prefer to use SVG images for larger page icons and the only time I really need to embed an FA icon is usually or bullet points or accordion arrows. It makes little sense to download all 7842 FA5 icons, and better sense to just download the ones you want, to speed up page loading.

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Thanks Gary, works perfectly. Was able to create a subset for Poster 2 with just some kb.

Excellent. It makes a difference and saves about the same as a reasonable hero banner image of 170Kb just for the old FA4 icons.

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