Font Awesome Icons in JavaFX (Part 1/3)

Using font-based iconography offers numerous benefits over graphic-based solutions. Fonts are easy to scale and recolor, allowing for greater flexibility in design; they can also be rotated or flipped without any loss of quality. This makes them ideal for creating flexible designs that remain visually appealing even when adapted to different contexts.

To make it even better, you do not have to provide extra icons with different resolutions for monitors with a higher pixel density.

Integrate Font Awesome with JavaFX

First things first you will need to do is download Font Awesome icons. The download contains the fontawesome-webfont.ttf file, which you have to add to the resources folder of your project. In a standard maven project structure, this would be src/main/resources, preferably in a subdirectory:

src/main/resources/fa/fontawesome-webfont.ttf

Now we need to introduce the font in the application. You can do this either by loading the font within the application code:

InputStream font = App.class.getResourceAsStream("/fa/fontawesome-webfont.ttf");
Font fontAwesome = Font.loadFont(font, 10);

Or you can include the font directly in the css:

@font-face {
   font-family: 'FontAwesome';
   src: url('/fa/fontawesome-webfont.ttf');
}