FontAwesome + LaTeX + Mac

Isshiki🐈
3 min readNov 3, 2020

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The past one hour has been miserable for me and I don’t want other people to waste their life on such a trivial thing. Hope this can help!

Editor

First of all, at this moment, MacTex = TeXShop + LaTeXiT, and each of them is a full feature LaTeX editor and, if I may say, (tex-to-) PDF generator in its own right. I am using TeXShop here.

Font Awesome

To install fontawesome, go to their official web site, (you don’t need to sign up!) click the small Download link below Start for Free and Get More with Pro.

Don’t stop just yet, keep scrolling down and find Free for Desktop

After the downlaod is finished, open the otfs directory, double click the files to install the fonts.

Font Awesome 5

Note that it’s not fontawesome anymore but fontawesome5, and if you want to make sure things are installed alright, open /usr/local/texlive/2020/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public and there should be a fontawesome5 directory.

Usage

Since the package is now called fontawesome5 and not fontawesome, a good number of solutions you find online just won’t work anymore and it can be really hard to find out what happens since the change is so subtle. To use fontawesome5, you simply need to include the correct package using the correct name, and put \faIcon between \begin{document} and \end{document}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontawesome5}

\begin{document}
\faGithub, \faLinkedin,
\faStackExchange, and \faStackOverflow
\end{document}

Some common solutions about LaTeX (XeLaTeX) I have found and tried are listed below.

  1. Correct but use use an outdated package name
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontawesome}

\begin{document}
\faGithub, \faLinkedin,
\faStackExchange, and \faStackOverflow
\end{document}

2. No longer relavant

Symbol mapping for XeLaTeX [StackOverflow] [GitHub Gist]

Listing package path [StackOverflow]

Edit:

Here I mostly talk about Font Awesome 5 but many packages still require Font Awesome (that is, Font Awesome 4 or below), and I personally think Font Awesome suits my needs better. To install Font Awesome 4, go to its homepage

Unlike Font Awesome 5, this Get Started button won’t ask you to sign up, click it and say no to whatever it offers, scroll down, find the Download button, click it and be prepared to say no again.

After the download is finished, open the fonts directory, install whatever you can. Now that we have installed Font Awesome 4, we can use the fontawesome package as usual, like

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontawesome}

\begin{document}
\faGithub, \faLinkedin,
\faStackExchange, and \faStackOverflow
\end{document}

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