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i'm trying to use Font Awesome but instead of any icons it just displays any asian signs. I downloaded font awsome to by webserver for that. I tried this in 3 different browsers (firefox, opera and chromium) but it is always the same.

A testpage can be seen here: http://2weitweitweg.de/test.html

And here is a screenshot of it: http://postimg.org/image/9yh5p0p97/

Does it show the signs in your browser? Is the problem browser- or server-related? How can i fix it?


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5 Answers

I had this problem and it was because I was using old html with a new fontawesome version.

I fixed it by changing:

<i class="fa-bitbucket"></i>


<i class="fa fa-bitbucket"></i>

I.e. I just had to add the default fa class to the element.

The latest version uses the fa prefix but for you, I guess it might be icon instead.

Hope this helps someone out at some stage :-)

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Most likely the actual font files are not being found. If you look in the font awesome CSS file you will probably see something like:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'FontAwesome';
  src: url('../font/fontawesome-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),

This expects to find the font files in a folder called font at the same level that the CSS file is in. For example:

myproject / css
                 / font-awesome.css
          / font
                 / fontawesome-webfont.eot

If the files are in the correct place it is possible that they are not being loaded because of some problem with permissions or even that you have are using a strange browser that does not properly support @font-face. Of course you can rule out the latter by browsing to the font awesome examples page to see if it displays the icons properly.

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if the html file which should show the text is not in myproject but in any different folder...Does the path to the font-files have to be relative with the path of the css file as "root" or is the html file which includes the css file the root? –  Jonas Nov 20 '13 at 16:53
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Hope I'm not too late, something on your server isn't configured properly, solution is to allow *.woff and *.tff to be requested like static resources just like you do with *.css and *.js, this is done differently depending on platform:

enter image description here

What I did to make it work:

Replaced your stylesheet with (since we can't get to resources):

<link href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/4.0.1/css/font-awesome.css" rel="stylesheet">

And replaced your old icon-* classes, for example:

<i class="fa-umbrella fa text-error"></i>

And now it works:

enter image description here

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same as me too, font-awesome works on my PC browsers [all of them], but i later tested font-awesome on a mobile java opera browser [the latest opera browser for java mobile phones (c2-03 to be precise)] i see only Asian signs/characters/symbols, sometimes i see boxes, instead of the font awesome symbols. i hope this will be resolved?

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If you using 4.0 or later, they've changed the icon classes to fa classes So your code should say

    <i class="fa fa-camera-retro fa-large"></i>

instead of

    <i class="icon icon-camera-retro icon-large"></i>

You can find icon, specific code examples by visiting http://fontawesome.io/icons/ and clicking/tapping the icon you need.

I had this same issue when upgrading from 3.2 to 4.0.3

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