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Topic: How is a font created? (Read 2 times)
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Recca
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« on: July 16, 2009, 09:46:52 pm » |
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First of all, sorry if this is the wrong board. I just thought that this section was the best fitting for this thread. Anyways, I tried looking on the web as well as the Getting Started Section here and I couldn't find any documents explaining how fonts are created. I'm interested in creating an 8x8 font like this one: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/3/I would like to include all English letters (A-Z and a-z), numbers (0-9), special characters (such as # $ %, etc.) as well as all punctuations and these Romanian letters (I hope they are displayed correctly): Capitals: Î Â Ă Ş Ţ Lower case: î â ă ş ţ I've been translating Chrono Trigger without being able to use them (except the circumflex ones). While most people on Romanian forums post without them and it's still understandable, I would still like to include them so it's more grammatically correct. It's kind of hard going through all of the script again to edit it though, but I at least wanted to include the accent letters in any future translation projects. Thanks in advance. Any help is greatly appreciated! :thumbsup: |
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Deathlike2
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« Reply #1 on: July 16, 2009, 10:09:18 pm » |
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Here's a rough explaination of the matter.
Font characters are usually part of a section of data used to display text. These are usually in a table of some form. Once you locate that table, it should be much easier to modify the font in question.
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Tauwasser
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« Reply #2 on: July 17, 2009, 03:10:14 am » |
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If you want to create a font, you can use pretty much any graphic utility. You then have to convert it to the format your system wants (a binary format) and have to work it into the game.
Usually for that, you have to locate the routine that writes text to screen and see where and how it takes it gfx from and simply replace that.
cYa,
Tauwasser
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DarknessSavior
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« Reply #3 on: July 17, 2009, 01:39:00 pm » |
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Also, you're going to have fun with CT's font. First, the dialog font is a Variable-Width Font. Which means if you add any characters to it, you'll have to edit the width-table to include them. Also, that font is a strange format: 8x12 (as opposed to normal fonts, 8x8, 8x16, etc...), which makes it slightly harder to edit.
All that said, good luck.
~DS
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nonme345
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« Reply #4 on: July 17, 2009, 05:05:25 pm » |
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Also, that font is a strange format: 8x12 (as opposed to normal fonts, 8x8, 8x16, etc...), which makes it slightly harder to edit.
In that case, you may use FEIDIAN. It supports those kinds of formats. |
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Recca
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« Reply #5 on: July 17, 2009, 06:00:04 pm » |
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Thank you all for the replies, it certainly did help clear up some things for me.  I've already gotten quite far in my CT translation, so I'm not sure if I'll edit the font or not, but I most certainly will for Illusion of Gaia and the other games that I have in mind to translate. Although Romanian is readable without accents, it's still better to have them since it's easier to distinguish words that way. That and also because it's more grammatical correct to include them as they should be... Also, a slightly off topic note. I tried downloading this utility to help me create my font: http://www.romhacking.net/utils/390/The problem is, when I tried to download it, my computer started spazzing out with virus warnings which actually forced me to restart it. I find this strange because I got other utilities from here at RHDN without any problems such as Aridia and Chrono Trigger Text Editor. Does this utility truly have a virus, or is my computer detecting something false? Maybe I'll use FEIDIAN instead then. |
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BRPXQZME
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« Reply #6 on: July 17, 2009, 06:06:42 pm » |
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Also, that font is a strange format: 8x12 (as opposed to normal fonts, 8x8, 8x16, etc...), which makes it slightly harder to edit.
In that case, you may use FEIDIAN. It supports those kinds of formats. Has something changed since this post? Also, a slightly off topic note. I tried downloading this utility to help me create my font: http://www.romhacking.net/utils/390/The problem is, when I tried to download it, my computer started spazzing out with virus warnings which actually forced me to restart it. I find this strange because I got other utilities from here at RHDN without any problems such as Aridia and Chrono Trigger Text Editor. Does this utility truly have a virus, or is my computer detecting something false? Maybe I'll use FEIDIAN instead then. Virustotal.com says it’s okay. One false positive, that’s it. |
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nonme345
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« Reply #7 on: July 17, 2009, 07:00:15 pm » |
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Also, that font is a strange format: 8x12 (as opposed to normal fonts, 8x8, 8x16, etc...), which makes it slightly harder to edit.
In that case, you may use FEIDIAN. It supports those kinds of formats. Has something changed since this post? Ah, didn't see.  |
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BRPXQZME
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« Reply #8 on: July 17, 2009, 07:03:09 pm » |
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It was not a rhetorical question. I am actually curious as to why it may be the case.
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Recca
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« Reply #9 on: July 17, 2009, 11:58:36 pm » |
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Virustotal.com says it’s okay. One false positive, that’s it. Ah, I see. Thanks for the clear up BRPXQZME. My computer usually spazzes out a lot. :laugh: I'm about half way done with my Chrono Trigger translation. After I finish it, I'll get to work on creating my custom 8x8 font. There's a lot of great GENS and SNES RPGs that I would like to translate. Thanks again for the help everyone! It's greatly appreciated! I hope that everything goes okay with the creation of my font. :beer: |
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BRPXQZME
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« Reply #10 on: July 18, 2009, 12:17:40 am » |
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If you’re not really comfortable with tackling the font now, you could feasibly write the script with accents and convert it to unaccented text before inserting it. It’d save you work if you decided to fix it later. Also, have a look at this site sometime. It’s a little overwhelming if you don’t know a whole lot of typographical stuff, but it’s one of the few web sites that actually tells you the nitty-gritty about how accents should look in a font; not exactly common knowledge, especially in the English-speaking world (wonder why ), and certainly would help if you decide to go for more than just what works for Romanian. |
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Next gen Cowboy
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« Reply #11 on: July 18, 2009, 12:45:18 am » |
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Good read, thank you.
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Recca
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« Reply #12 on: July 18, 2009, 09:19:38 am » |
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If you’re not really comfortable with tackling the font now, you could feasibly write the script with accents and convert it to unaccented text before inserting it. It’d save you work if you decided to fix it later. Thanks for the tip, I should have done that from the very beginning. Well, it would still be easier to start now and do the same with the first half after I'm finished translating. That site was indeed a good read. I knew most of the stuff behind the French and German accents, but they're were quite a few languages that I didn't know use them (besides the European ones). They seem to have forgotten mentioning that Romanian also uses Cedilla. Not a big deal though, it's easy to miss out something when you're entering a lot of information on a site. I'm curious to see how far I'll get, so I'll get to work on the creation of the font I had in mind soon. :thumbsup: |
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DQ Chao284
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« Reply #13 on: July 19, 2009, 06:15:42 am » |
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Also, that font is a strange format: 8x12 (as opposed to normal fonts, 8x8, 8x16, etc...), which makes it slightly harder to edit.
In that case, you may use FEIDIAN. It supports those kinds of formats. I have a question to be a bit specific, does this program also work with SNES based formats such as fixed width RLE formats used in Dragon Quest 5, 6, and 3r? |
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KaioShin
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« Reply #14 on: July 19, 2009, 06:24:37 am » |
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Also, that font is a strange format: 8x12 (as opposed to normal fonts, 8x8, 8x16, etc...), which makes it slightly harder to edit.
In that case, you may use FEIDIAN. It supports those kinds of formats. I have a question to be a bit specific, does this program also work with SNES based formats such as fixed width RLE formats used in Dragon Quest 5, 6, and 3r? Decompress binary data to a new file -> use FEIDIAN on that file. |
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