HD GUI subtitle font beta

[PiKeyAr]

HD GUI beta with support for subtitle and recap screen font

If anyone is interested in helping me with HD subtitle support for German, French or Spanish, please use this issue. I have done only the bare minimum to make the font display characters from European languages, so the mod is currently missing a lot of per-character settings. This is where I need your help. Read below for instructions.

Download beta

How to install: get the latest version of HD GUI 2, then unpack the beta archive into mods\HD_DCStyle overwriting any existing files.

Tweaking font settings The subtitle font consists of two things: a 1024x1024 texture with 256 characters on a 64x64 grid (_textures\subtitle\subtitleeu.png), and a fontdata.ini file in the mod's system folder. Character order in the font texture is generally identical to the CP1252 codepage with only a couple of characters different in the extended area. Characters 0 and 1 are reserved for a workaround to fix an issue with Japanese punctuation marks included with English text in the vanilla game. The recommended font size is 60 (for Impress BT) to allow at least 2 extra pixels on each size of the character cell (this is needed to avoid texture filtering/UV artifacts).

The fontdata.ini file contains per-character tweaks for the font:

• Character width in pixels
• Horizontal offset
• Vertical offset

The width parameter is necessary for more "natural" spacing between letters. The offsets adjust the character horizontally or vertically without needing to edit the font texture - this is useful for tall characters that wouldn't align properly otherwise.

Known issues and how to correct them

• There are faint artifacts around (usually above or below) a specific character.

Edit the font texture to make sure the character above or below the problematic one isn't too close to the edge of its cell. Use per-character offsets to compensate the position change.

• Certain characters in European languages have incorrect spacing, which results in letters being clumped together or spread out too wide.

Edit fontdata.ini to specify the problematic character's width. Check the font texture as well and make sure the character is aligned to the left (the character's leftmost pixel should be at cell's left edge + 2 pixels).

• Certain characters are above or below others.

Edit fontdata.ini to specify the problematic character's vertical offset.

How to contribute Play the game in French, German or Spanish, and note the characters which are misaligned. Find the character's index in fontdata.ini and specify the character's width and offsets. Usually just width is enough, however some tall letters may need a vertical offset as well. Test your width and offset settings ingame (you need to restart the game after editing the fontdata file and/or the font texture), and if it looks good, proceed to the next character. When finished, share your fontdata.ini (and the font texture if you edited it).

Thanks for helping me with the mod, and looking forward to your contributions.

[PiKeyAr]

After applying some manual tweaks on my own I decided to release the update. If anything shows up I'll correct that in later updates.