Okay, so in the screenshot thread I posted a mock-up of an 8x8 VWF. Surprisingly many people found it to be difficult to read. This was surprising since DeJap's Bahamut Lagoon patch uses an even thinner font, and I've never heard anyone complain about it.

I plan on using an 8x8 VWF exclusively for FEoEZ, and I want to get the game to be as attractive as possible. So I'm making a thread to get some opinions.

Now, for the actual text, letters will have an average width, sans space, of four. Nothing I can do about that. A space of five or more would mean abbreviating ~30% of all item names, character names, etc. Not going to happen.

The part that interests me most right now are the numbers (item counts, HP, MP, experience, etc). Should they be made variable-width as well, or left static?

This screenshot is a mockup, the game doesn't actually print HP/MP and such. It's just an example.



Benefits of making numbers VWF:
- more consistent with the text itself
- looks less gappy

Cons:
- will be slower (not substantially, but it'll be there)
- will create spacing / alignment issues nearly everywhere (as it will free up a lot of space); this will move the gaps from between numbers to between words
- harder to read, and numbers are arguably the most important thing on each screen
- eats up a lot more available tiledata
- either 1 will still be gappy, or look pretty bad anyway (with a serifed base in an otherwise sans-serif font)

It will obviously be a lot more work, but I'm not worried about this part, so I won't list that as a con.

So, I really wonder if it's worth the effort. The last thing I want to do is seem like I'm avoiding this because of difficulty. It's really no harder to make numbers VWF than it is to make text VWF, but I just feel that the cons outweigh the benefits. How about you guys?

I'll try and get some more pics up in the future for comparison.

It has a lot to do with what the base comparison is (comparing against the font FF2 SNES uses makes your pic look terrible by comparison). Additionally, it's a mock of my favorite game. 

In a translation, it's not comparable at all. People are oblivious to what is being compared, so it's not something you want to compare against.

Think of this way, I can't stand RPGOne's font for FF6 (I think it's fixed width). Compared to what FF3 SNES uses by default, the original font for FF3 is better.

The main problem with that font is the square shadow, which makes it not only hard to read, but also unpleasant (or at least it is for my eyes). Revision:

I removed a few black pixels near the grey "antialiasing". Also fixed the 's'  to make it consistent with the average width for lowercase characters.

As for the number matter, i think fixed width is fine, and convenient for menus with a lot of them.

Left is better.

Ah, good. So everyone here likes the static-width as well. That's good news -- I like it more, too.

Thank you everyone for your input, it's greatly appreciated.


Yes, I have those in my dialog font. I also have smallcaps and kerning, but ligatures looked terrible at such a low resolution, so I left those out.

But at 8x8, text figures would be too hard to pull off, I'm afraid.


The 's' looks like a tiny '8' now, and the 'a' connects which is kind of jarring, to me. I can't spare the extra pixel on the 's', anyway. Many names just barely fit as is. Meh, but fonts are personal preferences anyway. You have some good points with the shadowing. Perhaps I'll spend more time on it. My main concern was making the text stand out as much as possible, as some of the FEoEZ backgrounds are really, really vibrant, which make a standard down-right shadow insufficient for text readability.

That's a 6x8 font, though. I'd have to shrink numbers that are already stretched pretty wide to hide the gaps. A minimum of two pixels, so 0, 1 and 2 would only be five pixels high, and six pixels wide.

Okay, so we have:

Left: creaothceann, Gemini, FinalMinuet, Chester
Neutral: byuu, DarknessSavior, Dragonsbrethren
Right: Kajitani-Eizan

Again, I really don't want to seem lazy by not adding VWF to the numbers, but yeah ... it seems most actually prefer it as-is. And if that's the case, I don't see much point in doing at least twice the work.


It would help with the width, but the height is the real killer. I need at least a height of 10 to make it look good. That would be 6-pixels for x-height, one for lower figures, one for higher figures, one for shadow, and one for spacing.

There are lines where numbers are right on top of each other, eg:
1234
5678

We could probably omit the bottom line shadow, even though it'd look tacky, but we still need 9-height. If we omit the spacing, numbers would touch each other on some windows. Not good.

One thing you could try is making the numbers bold, it would somewhat emphasize the fact that they're fixed width but at the same time it would look like a stylistic choice. I like the way this looks in Bahamut Lagoon and Cless's ToP translation.

You could also do what I did for font 1 in Pandora's Box and use your gray to outline the fixed-width numbers:



That blurs together nicely with the white when viewed my TV and makes them look really good.

Of course the way you have it now is fine too, as I said I really didn't even notice the difference in width at first. Just offering some suggestions if you want them.