SF Symbols Metadata

Overview

At WWDC 2019 Apple announced SF Symbols, their own set of icons to use in native apps.

The official way to see the full list of provided icons is to use the SF Symbols app for macOS. And this is useful for humans. For computers? Not so much.

The data itself, including symbol names, search metadata, and much more, is baked into San Francisco font files in a non-documented private encrypted font table. When decrypted, it happens to be in a nice and easy CSV format.

SF Symbols Metadata extracts and decrypts this data.

Usage

CSV files

This repo contains the data extracted from font files, as it was originally stored. See the CSV folder.

Conversion script

You can use sfsymbolsconvert.py to extract the encrypted data contained in San Francisco font-family files yourself.

The script uses following dependencies: Click, FontTools, and PyCryptodome. You can install them manually through pip:

pip3 install click fonttools pycryptodomex

Or using Pipenv:

pipenv install
pipenv shell

Then you can run the script from Terminal like this: python3 sfsymbolsconvert.py PATH_TO_FONT. This will ask you to enter the AES Key and IV, see below for Apple values.

$ python3 sfsymbolsconvert.py SF-Pro-Text-Regular.otf
AES Key: B885F69E398CBA7240DB496BE8C61488549F1F885D476B2E2CC114F13B172120
AES IV: EFB0D12EFAC59114C3E5B91270F0C046
Written 413312 bytes to SF-Pro-Text-Regular-symbols.csv.

For further options, run python3 sfsymbolsconvert.py --help.