From time to time I’m writing documentation for new users and end up typing : to trigger the emoji completion and find the :bookmark: icon, or the :pin: icon, or the :gear: icon to show what to look for to accomplish a certain action. As exemplified with these three: , :pin:, and , the iconography seems not to be designed for such a use-case. I end up using longer sentence to avoid adding to the confusion of the (usually impressed) users who freshly dived into Discourse.
It seems there’s already a (fastidious) way to Change icons globally, but I’m wondering whether there are other options to use Discourse UI icons in posts somehow.
I vaguely recall many years ago I had a plugin that did this, it is broken by now, I recommend holding off on this idea till we are done with our fontawesome upgrade, cause once that is done the palate of optional icons becomes enormous making it far more appealing to re-build that old trivial plugin
If you were using Font Awesome 4.7, you should be able to just switch to Fork Awesome 1.1 and get all the benefits from it. If you were using npm or composer packages, replace the ones you were using by this Fork Awesome ones. Or if you downloaded a static copy of Font Awesome, download the latest version of Fork Awesome and replace CSS and font files in your project and you should be good to go.
We paid special attention not to change unicode codepoints for the existing icons, nor changed the CSS class names or icon names from Font Awesome 4.7. Though we added a few more icons and made the process of contributing to this project much easier. Though, if you see a mistake, please don’t hesitate to file a bug.
Good point @erlend_sh maybe we can contact them and suggest they use Discourse
@hellekin in this upcoming release we are planning to move to all SVG icons for flexibility and away from a specific icon font, it’s a project @awesomerobot is heading up.
, :pin:, and 
, the iconography seems not to be designed for such a use-case. I end up using longer sentence to avoid adding to the confusion of the (usually impressed) users who freshly dived into Discourse.
