Have you used Font Awesome 4 on the desktop and are ready to upgrade? We've made a dedicated ligature-based set of fonts with Version 5, but you can still use the old glyph copy and pasting way too. Here's how to move to you and your documents to the latest and greatest.
What's Changed?
There are some differences between Versions 4 and 5. In Version 5, we introduced the 3 styles or weights for each icon - solid, regular, and light. We also separated out brand icons into their own style/category for easier use.
Icon Style | Availability | Font Files in the Download |
---|---|---|
Solid | Free | Font Awesome 5 Free-Solid-900.otf |
Regular | Free | Font Awesome 5 Free-Regular-400.otf |
Brands | Free | Font Awesome 5 Brands-Regular-400.otf |
Solid | Pro only | Font Awesome 5 Pro-Solid-900.otf |
Regular | Pro only | Font Awesome 5 Pro-Regular-400.otf |
Light | Pro only | Font Awesome 5 Pro-Light-300.otf |
We also cleaned up our icon naming conventions. There are a number of Version 4 icons that have been renamed with that in mind.
Remove Version 4 Fonts and Assets
Firstly, through your operating system's font management software, find and remove any of Font Awesome 4's assets (as they can cause confusion and rendering issues). Look for, deactivate, and delete a font named "FontAwesome".
Install and Use Version 5 Ligature-based Fonts
Find and install the new fonts found in the /use-on-the-desktop
folder of the Font Awesome Desktop download. Make sure that you include brands as well as solid and regular weights to match with Version 4. For Macs, that is often Font Book or Font Explorer X. Also, depending on your operating system and management software, make sure you activate/enable the new fonts in the Font Manager once they are installed.
Check out these articles for installing fonts on PC (opens new window) and installing fonts on Mac (opens new window) to get more details and guidance on installing and activating fonts for your machine.
Updating and Proofing Existing Documents
We recommend visually checking your existing documents that were using Version 4's icons. On top of that, you'll need to change the typeface used in those documents to be "Font Awesome 5 Free" or "Font Awesome 5 Pro" if you are a Pro license holder using Pro icons. We've tried to map any existing unicode and glyph values Version 4 icons had to the correct Version 5 icon, so you shouldn't have to do much if your document has text layers with copied + pasted glyphs from Version 4.
Next Steps
You're ready to get going with Version 5's icons. Head on over to how to reference icons using ligatures or using glyphs.