Is there a plan for supporting <Material Symbols> in compose?

# compose

[Kyant]

Is there a plan for supporting Material Symbols in compose?

[Zoltan Demant]

https://developer.android.com/reference/kotlin/androidx/compose/material/icons/package-summary ?

[Grégory Lureau]

(and it's also available for CfD)

[Stylianos Gakis]

Material icons and Material Symbols are two different things afaik. If you click on the original link in this thread you’ll see a bunch of icons we don’t have access to with the material.icons dependency. The link says 2.500+ glyphs. We definitely don’t have 2500 icons in the androidx.compose.material.icons dependency. Plus those new symbols allow for more customisability with size, weights and stuff like that.

[Grégory Lureau]

I didn't know the difference, thanks! (Also note that `androidx.compose.material:material-icons-extended`adds a lot of icons, but they are still not embedded in a font. Looks like it's closed/more to 2100 icons, in up to 4 different styles)

[Tgo1014]

Would be nice to have the preview for the icons 😅

[Kyant]

@Tgo1014 There is a plugin that can preview the compose icons ☺️

[Tgo1014]

Do you have a link? Sounds really useful

[Kyant]

Here you go
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/19585-compose-icon-viewer

[Kyant]

I tried to use Text to display Material Symbols font, but the symbols aren't always rectangular.

If I wrap Text with a Box, the icon will shift down a bit, just because it behaves like text.

[Kyant]

@Stylianos Gakis You can download it in your browser, then drag it to Android Studio.

[Zoltan Demant]

That plugin was awesome, thank you. I love this slack channel! 🦜

[Casey Brooks]

Note that “icon fonts” really are just a hacky way to get SVGs into HTML websites, rather than actually being a good way to display icons. You’ll be much better off using proper `Image()`/`Icon()` composables with material-icons-extended as they provide accessibility info you won’t get in Text(), as well as image filters, tinting, and things like that

[eygraber]

My design team heavily relies on using icon fonts to inline icons into text. They always point to SFSymbol and say that if Apple can do it, then Google can as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Siyamed]

I will ask to google fonts team as well, but meanwhile what stops a developer to use the font provided (either by embedding into an app or using downloadable fonts)

[Siyamed]

Was the question more about having them in vector drawable format?