I guess this should be a common problem, but googling does not give me much on this topic.
We are currently developing a web app. It uses both Font Awesome and Glyphicons since neither of them alone provides the complete set of icons for us. We only use around 25 icons from these 2 fonts, but their font files weigh around 2.5MB, which leaves much room for optimization. We guess we probably should not make our users download 2.5MB of data just for these 25 icons (100KB/icon). At the same time, we probably don't want to ask a design service to custom make those icons for us, since these existing icons are of reasonable quality, and free.
So my question is: is there a way to extract the icons we need from the 2 fonts' files, merge them, and save them as a new font for use in CSS? I imagine leaving out unused icons like this would cut down file size significantly.
Of course, a cheap way is to make a pixel version of each of the icons, then make a sprite with all the pixelized icons in a big PNG, but that would lose many of the nice properties of font icons, which we don't want.
Any input would be appreciated.
Thanks!