I have been struggling with some text hacking and have some questions. As a newbie, I’ve read several of these documents on text, and have understood them well enough, but in actual practice, things aren’t working out as I think they should.
First, do the graphic tiles for the text correspond to how they’re ordered in hex? – it’s just something that none of the guides ever clarified. 
Next, I can replace Japanese text graphics with English ones, but since there are so many more Japanese characters/symbols, I’m not sure how to make a relative search for the English as those letters do not appear in long enough strings. I was thinking of creating a font block with just random characters and symbols and numbering those (if the tile graphics do correspond to the hex values for them) as to cover most of the Japanese… But I’m not sure if that would get me anywhere.
Also, while messing around, trying to figure these things out (I was using the Japanese RPGs Chaos Seed and Xak for the SNES), the text would not even display properly. I wondered if this was because it ran out of room… In Chaos Seed, it seemed as though in what was a single line or two, there appeared a main line of text, but above and below it was that text split in half. Then in Xak, the text didn’t do that, but on a single line, two letters would appear vertically where there should have only been one letter.

This has been really fun, and I’d like to take it up seriously… I’m just trying to get basics down for now, but I’ll get my hands dirty when Summer comes around.

Thanks!

I can tell you right now that "normal" methods of text location are not going to find Chaos Seed's dialogue - it's compressed. Sorry.

What you found in TLP is the font. You can't find dialogue in a graphics editor. You use a hex editor and table for that.