How to prevent material icon text from showing up when Google's JS fails to convert them?

Question

How do you prevent material icon text from showing up when Google's JS fails to convert them to icons?

Icons are defined in markup as such:

<span class="material-icons">icon_name</span> 

Example: https://archive.fo/CKqKG/scr.png (see the top row of buttons).

Material Icons Documentation: https://material.io/icons/

This is also an issue in Google search where Google will actually read and save the div's text instead of ignoring it.

Example: https://i.imgur.com/TixS06y.png

I understand that one solution is to simply switch to .PNGs (supplied by Google). I'd like to do whatever results in less (network) load on the user's system.

Thanks!

Answer 1

you can use font-display: block;, just add this CSS to your HTML head:

<style>    @font-face {       font-family: 'Material Icons';       font-display: block;     } </style> 

for more information font-display

Answer 2

I've been struggling with a similar situation: my problem was not that the icons never loaded, just that they could take a while to load on slower connections and until they loaded ugly, unformatted text like sentiment_very_satisfied would be shown on the page (often many times larger than the surrounding text as well making it very obvious).

The other solutions here didn't work for me (including font-display:block which I thought might be promising), so I came up with my own using CSS and jQuery. I'm sure you could easily adapt it to use vanilla JS.

CSS:

.material-icons{     opacity:0; } 

jQuery:

$(window).load(function() {     $('.material-icons').css('opacity','1'); }); 

The trick here is that, unlike the more commonly used $(document).ready() listener, $(window).load() waits for all elements of a page to be downloaded before being triggered. In this case, that means it won't change the opacity of the icons until the icon font has been downloaded.

The downside is that the icons won't show up until everything on the page has been downloaded, but that was a trade-off I was willing to make to avoid having huge spans of text visible on my page before the icon font loaded.

(I also added a transition to the CSS .material-icons{transition:opacity 0.5s;} so they showed up nice and smooth.)