Use Font Awesome Icons in CSS

Question

I have some CSS that looks like this:

#content h2 {
   background: url(../images/tContent.jpg) no-repeat 0 6px;
}

I would like to replace the image with an icon from Font Awesome.

I do not see anyway to use the icon in CSS as a background image. Is this possible to do assuming the Font Awesome stylesheets/fonts are loaded before my CSS?

Answer 1

You can try this example class. and find icon content here: http://astronautweb.co/snippet/font-awesome/

  #content h2:before {
    display: inline-block;
    font: normal normal normal 14px/1 FontAwesome;
    font-size: inherit;
    text-rendering: auto;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
    transform: translate(0, 0);
    content: "\f007";
    }

Answer 2

Actually even font-awesome CSS has a similar strategy for setting their icon styles. If you want to get a quick hold of the icon code, check the non-minified font-awesome.css file and there they are....each font in its purity.

Answer 3

Alternatively, if using Sass, one can "extend" FA icons to display them:

.mytextwithicon:before {
  @extend .fas, .fa-angle-double-right;

  @extend .mr-2; // using bootstrap to add a small gap
                 // between the icon and the text.
}

Answer 4

#content h2:before {
    content: "\f055";
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    left:0;
    position:absolute;
    top:0;
}

Example Link: https://codepen.io/bungeedesign/pen/XqeLQg

Get Icon code from: https://fontawesome.com/cheatsheet?from=io

Answer 5

Consolidating everything above, the following is the final class which works well

   .faArrowIcon {
        position:relative;
    }

    .faArrowIcon:before {
        font-family: FontAwesome;
        top:0;
        left:-5px;
        padding-right:10px;
        content: "\f0a9"; 
    }

Answer 6

You can't use text as a background image, but you can use the :before or :after pseudo classes to place a text character where you want it, without having to add all kinds of messy extra mark-up.

Be sure to set position:relative on your actual text wrapper for the positioning to work.

.mytextwithicon {
    position:relative;
}    
.mytextwithicon:before {
    content: "\25AE";  /* this is your text. You can also use UTF-8 character codes as I do here */
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    left:-5px;
    position:absolute;
    top:0;
 }

EDIT:

Font Awesome v5 uses other font names than older versions:

• For FontAwesome v5, Free Version, use: font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free"
• For FontAwesome v5, Pro Version, use: font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Pro"

Note that you should set the same font-weight property, too (seems to be 900).

Another way to find the font name is to right click on a sample font awesome icon on your page and get the font name (same way the utf-8 icon code can be found, but note that you can find it out on :before).