Upgrade from v4

Have you used Font Awesome 4 on the desktop and are ready to upgrade?

Upgrade to v6 instead!

Ready to upgrade? We recommend upgrading to the latest version instead of v5 (unless you’ve got a reason to stick with 5). Get the deets on upgrading to v6.

What’s Changed?

There are some differences between v4 and v5. In v5, we introduced the 3 styles or weights for each icon - solid, regular, and light. We also separated out brand icons into their own style/category for easier use.

Icon Style	Availability	Font Files in the Download
Solid	Free	Font Awesome 5 Free-Solid-900.otf
Regular	Free	Font Awesome 5 Free-Regular-400.otf
Brands	Free	Font Awesome 5 Brands-Regular-400.otf
Solid	Pro only	Font Awesome 5 Pro-Solid-900.otf
Regular	Pro only	Font Awesome 5 Pro-Regular-400.otf
Light	Pro only	Font Awesome 5 Pro-Light-300.otf

We also cleaned up our icon naming conventions. There are a number of v4 icons that have been renamed with that in mind.

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Remove v4 Fonts and Assets

Firstly, through your operating system’s font management software, find and remove any of Font Awesome 4’s assets (as they can cause confusion and rendering issues). Look for, deactivate, and delete a font named “FontAwesome”.

Deactivate the v4 Font

Delete the v4 Font

Install and Use v5 Ligature-based Fonts

Find and install the new fonts found in the /use-on-the-desktop folder of the Font Awesome Desktop download. Make sure that you include brands as well as solid and regular weights to match with v4. For Macs, that is often Font Book or Font Explorer X. Also, depending on your operating system and management software, make sure you activate/enable the new fonts in the Font Manager once they are installed.

Install and activate the v5 Fonts

Check out these articles for installing fonts on PC and installing fonts on Mac to get more details and guidance on installing and activating fonts for your machine.

Upgrading Outlined or Rasterized Icons

If you’ve converted v4 text layers to outlines or are using rasterized versions of icons, you’ll need to manually update those in your documents. Sorry! We wish we could help more. Don’t forget, you’ve got individual vectors of each icon in v5 in the /svgs folder. They’re your best bet for replacing in this case.

Updating and Proofing Existing Documents

We recommend visually checking your existing documents that were using v4’s icons. On top of that, you’ll need to change the typeface used in those documents to be “Font Awesome 5 Free” or “Font Awesome 5 Pro” if you are a Pro license holder using Pro icons. We’ve tried to map any existing unicode and glyph values v4 icons had to the correct v5 icon, so you shouldn’t have to do much if your document has text layers with copied + pasted glyphs from v4.

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Next Steps

You’re ready to get going with v5’s icons. Head on over to how to reference icons using ligatures or using glyphs.