The Material Design Icons had an issue that all path data was simply being compressed and not optimized. Points were rounded, but curves were not correctly converted to arcs. A curve like C2,2.9 2.9,2 4,2 is actually a perfect arc and should be A2,2 0 0,1 4,2.

This operation over 684 icons accounts for a lot of unneeded decimal points. All these characters accounted for a 20% reduction in all path data. Moreover each font dropped in size. WOFF 1%, TTF 12%, and EOT 12%. The WOFF is already heavily compressed and saw a marginal drop from this operation.

Other optimizations are planned in the future, but this will be one of the more significant updates. Future scripts will correct for unneeded points seen in circles and line segments left by designers during the creation of the icon.