@ntag/react-fontawesome

This package allows you to color individual pieces of Font Awesome icons, using React.

It is basically the same as @fortawesome/react-fontawesome, except <FontAwesomeIcon> accepts a new prop fill={['color1', 'color2', 'color3']} to specify the colors of the different parts of the icon.

Installation

Install React FontAwesome as usual, except @fortawesome/react-fontawesome you replace by @ntag/react-fontawesome:

$ npm i --save @fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core \
  npm i --save @fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons \
  npm i --save @ntag/react-fontawesome

Usage

In your main file (index.js, App.js):

import { library } from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core';
import { faCloudSun } from '@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons';

library.add(faCloudSun);

In your component:

import FontAwesomeIcon from '@ntag/react-fontawesome';

export const Weather = () => (
  <div>
    <h1>Weather</h1>
    <FontAwesomeIcon icon="cloud-sun" fill={['#3C6997', '#EDFF71', '#F1DB4B']} />
  </div>
);

fill accepts an array of CSS colors. Use currentColor to use the text color. The text color will also be used if the fill array is smaller than the number of pieces in the icon.

Finally, if you don't pass the fill property, <FontAwesomeIcon> will work exactly the same as the original one from @fortawesome/react-fontawesome.

Also, instead of using an array, you can also use multiple props: fill0, fill1, fill2, fill3 to colors the parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 for example.

How does it work?

Font Awesome icons are composed by a single <path> SVG element.

First, the path is split on m or M letters, indicating a movement of the pencil, to get multiple pieces.

We have multiple pieces but two problems: the paths are not correctly positionned, and the subtraction of shapes doesn't work anymore. We start by recomputing the correct position of each piece.

It looks better. However, the second piece should be subtracted to the first one, to create a hole. Even if the two paths are drawn in opposite directions, the subtraction doesn't work because they are now in two different <path>. We need to merge elements which work together.

To do that, the algorithm takes each path, computes if it intersects the previous one, and if that's the case, merge the two <path> together, so the subtraction works. If that's not the case, it doesn't merge them and process the next path.