Why Do My Icons Change Size?

After building up an icon font set for a new project, our designer added them to our fontcustom source directory. We noticed, after regenerating the icon-font, that the size and layout of some of our existing icons changed. The root cause was that some of the new icons had irregular canvasses, or, in some cases, that the vector graphics were defined beyond the canvas.

After experimenting with our entire icon set a few times, I found the following principles:

• If your canvas isn't square, fontcustom will make it square, so start with a square canvas. We've chosen a 1000px × 1000px canvas.
• If your vector graphics overrun the canvas on top or bottom, then your entire icon set will be modified in some determined, but not currently known (to me) way.
• If your vector graphics overrun the canvas on the left or right, then the glyph will also overrun the left or right border in your font.

Hope this is helpful to others who encounter similar problems in the future.