Icons missing from the WebFront 4 interface in Windows

Applies to: WebFront 4

Overview

Icon fonts are commonly used in web design throughout interfaces for a number of reasons:

• They are vector based, and so can scale to any size without losing quality
• Because they are a font, their color can be set and different files are not necessary for each color in which they need to be shown
• Their small file size, which means that multiple versions of an icon for different sizes and colors are not necessary
• All icons are within one font set, reducing the amount of HTTP requests needed to load a page (and thus the total page load time)

We use Font Awesome icon fonts.

Gridpro follows this standard web practice and uses icon fonts to display icons throughout the interface. The following screenshots show some examples of where they are used.

Problem Cause

If these icons are not appearing when using Windows 10, you might have Untrusted Font Blocking enabled.

Untrusted Font Blocking is a new feature of Windows 10 that can be deployed throughout organizations using a group policy. A TechNet article describes a scenario that can occur when visiting certain websites:

Using Internet Explorer to look at websites that use embedded fonts. In this situation, the feature blocks the embedded font, causing the website to use a default font. However, not all fonts have all of the characters, so the website might render differently.

Testing

A simple way to test whether the Untrusted Font Blocking setting is causing your icon display issues is as follows:

• Look for the @font-face encountered unknown error message in your browser console
• Try visiting the Font Awesome Examples page and see if the icons appear on it
• Try visiting your WebFront instance using a different operating system, such as Windows 7 or MacOS
  Although this group policy can be set on all Windows machines, its effects are seen only in Windows 10 or later releases. If the icons appear in Windows 7, for example, you probably have this setting enabled.
  

Solution

Because WebFront is not currently compatible with the Enabled setting of the Untrusted Font Blocking feature, ensure that this feature is set either to Disabled or to Not Configured.