I've been trying all day to get custom icon fonts to work in IE 8 (for example, with Fontello or Icomoon).
Both Fontello and Icomoon offer "demo" pages of the icon font after you download it. I've been using the demo pages to test.
As far as platform, I've been using the IE8 on WinXP VM from ModernIE.
The issue that I'm experiencing is that somewhere inbetween 50 and 90 percent of the time the font loads fine. The rest of the time it fails to load, resulting in blank space where it should be if using fontello, or a box where it should be if using icomoon.
I feel as if I've tried every fix mentioned anywhere on the internet.
Am I going crazy? Is it not possible to get icon fonts to work on IE 8 every single time the page loads? Do I have to settle for sporatic loading?
In order to reproduce the error, simply download any random custom font from icomoon or fontello and use with the IE8 on WinXP VM from ModernIE (as mentioned above). I can't speak for other configurations (such as IE8 on Win7) but I would expect they'd be the same.
I have the same problem and found absolutely nothing on the internet.
So I tried my own way and found a solution. It's rather long to do, but at least it seems to work.
I don't know where lies the problem exactly but it's the only way I found to get rid of it.
I thought about doing this when I saw that another icon font I used (which didn't come from Fontello) did not have this problem. Whenever I reloaded the page, this one always worked fine, but the Fontello font went berserk.
I hope this helps and that Fontello finds a way to resolve this problem in the future.