Support FontIcon widget

At least in winRT and web apps using font-icons instead of png/gif/jpg or even SVG icons get’s increasingly common.

There are some very significant advantages:

• Infinite Scalability: No need to think about different image and screen resolutions.
• No additional resources: All you need is one font (which is either part of the OS or bundled with client).
• Customizable colors: Decide at runtime which color the icon should have.
• Consistent UI: Using one (or two) fonts per client gives your app have a look matching the OS.

Disadvantages:

• Monochromatic only

Windows and Android provide fonts for their platform, see here, here and here. I couldn’t find one for iOS/Mac/Apple, but there are free fonts we could use, like this one, this one and this one. Those could also be used to fill in missing icons on the android/windows fonts.

We would have to find common icons the different fonts use and make them available under one keyword, e.g.

tabris.create("FontIcon", { glyph: "phone", ios_glyph: "#8657" } );

I think this feature would fit perfectly with our “easey-to-use” USP. Discuss!

[cpetrov]

It’s not possible to use custom fonts where the Tabris widget API only supports an ImageValue (Tab#image, Action#image, ActionSheetItem#image, Button#image, ToggleButton#image, Page#image) so the usage of custom fonts as icons is currently limited.

[mpost]

With the support for external fonts this could be implemented with an icon font. Closing as resolved.