Font Awesome Packages

Everybody loves the icons provided by Font Awesome since they are pixel perfect, accessibility minded, desktop and web friendly. The free version of the font provides 1,535 icons and pro version provides 7016 icons which encompass almost all facets of human activities for which an icon might be necessitated when a software interface or web page is designed. Such is the variety of themes that were covered. In fact, TEXFolio and Neptune use the free version of awesome fonts for the choice of icons used for the web interfaces.

Almost in tune with the release of awesoms fonts, a few packages have also appeared at CTAN, the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network, the official repository where TEX softwares are archived for public consumption. The first among the packages, namely, fontawesome.sty contributed by Xavier Danaux who did the font integration into LATEX and Dave Gandy who indeed designed the awesome fonts. The package provides easy to use interface to invoke the glyphs in a TeX document similar to the one followed in web development.

Second package is fontawesome5.sty by Marcel Kruger which does an identical job as its predecessor with similar interface, but covers all the glyphs in the ltatest version of the font (5.10). The last one is awesomebox.sty by Etienne Deparis. It provides an easy interface to include any of the glyphs which can be used in a document to communicate some information like a warning, caveat, additional information, etc., with necesary bells and whistles. The user can also define newer functions and environments of her choice. In fact, the newer edition of LATEX Primer of TUGIndia will have this package used to indicate warnings and extra information to the reader. All the packages are available at https://ctan.org/pkg/<pkgname> for free download and usage.