I'm not really happy with either of these; since fonts are scalable like a vector, if people misuse the font and scale up it will be a mess. But this are two alternatives I came up with; 16x16 size up top and a zoom in on the bottom of each.

There isn't enough pixel space here to do actual hatches.

I like them better than the version without the ∞. I'm having a hard time deciding which is better offhand.

test otf

@mattdm waiting to see your thoughts before doing anything else here.

That font does weird things at different sizes (the logo gets truncated). Other than that it appears to scale down pretty well — the antialiasing turns the checks to gray, basically. It'd be nice to get someone to test it on Windows and OS X.

My thinking is that we'd offer this with guidance that says it needs to be used in compliance with the logo and trademark guidelines, and that where actual grayscale is a possibility instead of pure black and white, we prefer the grayscale version to be used instead.

Hmmmm; this may be a situation where I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be helpful, but doesn't OTF support switching to different glyphs at different display sizes? Do any of the free/open tools support that?

My thinking is that we'd offer this with guidance that says it needs to be used in compliance
with the logo and trademark guidelines, and that where actual grayscale is a possibility instead > of pure black and white, we prefer the grayscale version to be used instead.

The one-color version should not be used in any case other than a font icon case. That's the only addition I'd make the to the logo/trademark guidelines; the rule will still stand that the logotype itself in black should be used in one-color situations. This icon should not be used in print and it should not be used in any other non-font icon treatment (this is why I am less than enthusiastic about addressing this issue at all, I'm concerned about the floodgates it may open.)

It'd be nice to get someone to test it on Windows and OS X.

For someone to test this on Windows / OS X - I don't have that capability, nor do I know who could do that work. Do you?

but doesn't OTF support switching to different glyphs at different display sizes? Do any of the
free/open tools support that?

What glyph would you have to it switch to at what sizes?

FontAwesome is offered in otf, ttf, woff, eot, and svg. We can't rely on a feature that is only present for one or a subset of the formats, right?

Also is FontAwesome the right library? We standardize on bootstrap in Fedora infra and bootstrap uses glyphicons. Would we send this to all of them?

+1 on switching "prefer" to "should not".

I can find some other-OS users.

I was thinking maybe switching to smaller checks at larger sizes. But I have no idea how hard that is to implement in font tooling.

On libraries: yeah, I think including it wherever there are similar libraries make sense.

OK, can you reach out to upstream and see about switching the check sizes at different font sizes and if they think it'd be possible / make sense? (particularly given the number of different types of fonts they ship?)

Also, can you figure out what upstream libraries you'd want us to have this included in?

Yes. Thanks for this!

Cool, I'm pretty sure fontforge can do whatever, so I'm not worried about tooling, just worried about feasibility / what's commonly done and supported, etc

@mattdm any updates on this? doing some triage, trying to clean up tickets, not sure what the status is here

I'll ping the upstream again.

@mattdm any word? (doing triage today)

I put comments directly in the upstream issue trackers. We'll see where that goes. :)

pinged upstream...

I'm going to close this, because we have a stopgap version of the current logo up on font awesome now, and have a pending logo redesign that addresses the issue.