Convert Icon Fonts to SVG on Windows with Character Map UWP

I love icons. Always have. And Google’s Material Symbols & Icons are some of my favorites. They come in multiple styles—regular, outline, round, sharp, and duotone—and you can download them individually for free. I also use Font Awesome and Freepik, so I’m never hurting for icons. But I’m particular. I like my icons portable, organized, and ready to drop into websites or documents. That usually means SVGs.

Here’s the problem: unlike Font Awesome, Google doesn’t hand you a neat little “download all icons as SVG” option. All I could find were the OTF/TTF font files. Annoying… until it hit me—I already had a tool that could see every glyph in a font: Character Map UWP. It’s a Windows app (sorry, Mac – there’s probably something similar out there for you) that lets you browse fonts visually and export individual glyphs. GitHub can be confusing, so if you don’t feel like playing detective, grab it from the Microsoft Store.

Here’s the workflow:

• Install Character Map UWP

• Install your icon font (Material Icons, Font Awesome, etc.)

• Open the app and select the font

• Scroll through the glyphs (yep, all your icons)

• Right-click any icon and export it as PNG or SVG

• Open the SVG in your editor of choice (Canva handles SVG like a Champ.)

That’s it. It took me way too long to realize this tool was sitting right there, so I’m sharing in case it saves you some time. And remember, there is no such thing as too many fonts or too many icons.