Qt ForkAwesome: Qt ForkAwesome

Qt ForkAwesome 0.3.2 Library that bundles ForkAwesome for use within Qt applications

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Qt ForkAwesome

Library that bundles ForkAwesome icons for use within Qt applications

# Build instructions

## Dependencies

The library depends on the following Qt modules (version 5.15 or higher): core, gui

The additional library for Qt Quick integration (currently only providing a QQuickImageProvider) depends on the following further Qt modules: quick

At build time qtutilities and c++utilities are required. This library is built in the same way as these libraries so checkout the c++utilities repository for detailed instructions.

To generate the header with icon definitions, Perl and the module YAML::XS (or YAML or YAML::Tiny) are required. To use a specific Perl binary, one can set the CMake variable PERL_BIN. Under Windows, one can simply install perl-YAML-Tiny via MSYS2 and set PERL_BIN to the path of perl.exe from the MSYS2 installation.

## Providing the font file

Of course the font file and icon definitions for ForkAwesome need to be supplied as well. If none of the variables mentioned in the next paragraph are specified, the build system will attempt to download the files from GitHub automatically.

To supply the files manually, just download the ttf, woff or woff2 file from ForkAwesome's fonts directory and the icon definitions file. Then specify the path of the downloaded files via the CMake variables FORK_AWESOME_FONT_FILE and FORK_AWESOME_ICON_DEFINITIONS, e.g. add -DFORK_AWESOME_FONT_FILE=/path/to/Fork-Awesome/fonts/forkawesome-webfont.woff2 and -DFORK_AWESOME_ICON_DEFINITIONS=/path/to/Fork-Awesome/src/icons/icons.yml to the CMake invocation. The font file will be built into the library and is hence only required at build time.

The Web Open Font Format (the .woff/.woff2 file) might not be supported by the font renderer. Notably, Window's native font rendering which Qt uses by default does not support it. Then it makes sense to use the True Type Font instead. Alternatively, one can force the platform plugin to use FreeType2 (e.g. by setting QT_QPA_PLATFORM=windows:fontengine=freetype). Recent versions of FreeType2 even support Web Open Font Format 2 (the .woff2 file) but this requires FreeType2 to be configured with Brotli support.

## Examples

Checkout https://github.com/Martchus/PKGBUILDs/tree/master/qtforkawesome for examples to build for GNU/Linux and Windows against Qt 5 and Qt 6.

## Further remarks

As usual with CMake projects, it is possible to control whether to build as static or shared library via the BUILD_SHARED_LIBS variable. If you build qtforkawesome as part of another project and only want to affect qtforkawesome, you can also use the variable QT_FORK_AWESOME_BUILD_SHARED_LIBS.

# Usage

The installation provides a CMake find module called qtforkawesome which provides the imported target qtforkawesome. A pkg-config file is provided as well. Once configured, the library is fairly simple to use:

#include <qtforkawesome/icon.h>
#include <qtforkawesome/renderer.h>
auto renderer = QtForkAwesome::Renderer();
renderer.pixmap(QtForkAwesome::Icon::Globe, QSize(64, 64), Qt::black);

There's also renderer.render(…) which takes a QPainter directly.

## Icon engine

A QIconEnginePlugin is provided as well. When it is loaded one can create a QIcon using a file name with .fa extension, e.g.:

const auto icon = QIcon(QStringLiteral("qrcode:blue.fa"));

The color will be deduced from the applications default color palette unless it is specified explicitly like in the example above.

To link against the plugin statically, find the CMake module qtforkawesomeiconengine, link against the imported target qtforkawesomeiconengine and add Q_IMPORT_PLUGIN(ForkAwesomeIconEnginePlugin) to one of your source files.

## QQuickImageProvider

A QQuickImageProvider is provided as well in form of the additional library qtquickforkawesome.

Then just include the header:

#include <qtquickforkawesome/imageprovider.h>

Create an instance and add it to your QQmlEngine:

engine->addImageProvider(QStringLiteral("fa"), new QtForkAwesome::QuickImageProvider(renderer));

And use it like this:

Image {
source: "image://fa/syncthing"
}

## Bundling

It is also possible to build the library as part of your project. Simply add it via add_subdirectory. Checkout the Syncthing Tray's project file for an example.

# Copyright notice and license

Copyright © 2021-2025 Marius Kittler

All code is licensed under [GPL-2-or-later](LICENSE).