On fonts

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pvdk
Posts: 528
Joined: 12 Aug 2011, 16:34

Re: On fonts

Post by pvdk »

Markelius wrote:I'm lead to believe Morrowind uses some kind of slightly modified .fnt format.
Don't be fooled by the extension, the .fnt format Bethesda uses is nothing like the .fnt format you're thinking of.
Markelius wrote:I still have no clue what variant of Magic Cards Bethesda used
I'm pretty sure there's is no vector-based font file that was used by Bethesda to create the bitmap fonts. Instead, I think the designer used scanned images, which would explain the horrible quality. Bethesda was kind enough to also include a TrueType font on the Construction Set CD, but it only supports about the same characters as the ones you found do.

There are however some fonts you haven't found, which do have a small subset of the glyphs we need. They are a commercial font called EF Medieva and a Cyrillic font I found on a dodgy Russian mobile phone skin website.
Markelius wrote:I have been able to replace the default Magic Cards font with a slightly edited version of a "Magic Cards" font I downloaded online. The font was free for personal use so it should be okay to distribute.
No, it's not. It doesn't work like that. For example, we used to ship Dongle's Daedric font, but the license said it could only be distributed as an archive. Luckly for us Ogre can read resources from .zip files, but that example shows how difficult it is to work with these custom licenses.
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Markelius
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Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 09:13

Re: On fonts

Post by Markelius »

Well, for now I did manage to get a custom tweaked Magic Cards font working in OpenMw. It's not an open source solution and it only supports the English alphabet and punctuation, but in my opinion it looks a lot nicer than a bitmap font.

I would indeed be really interested in georgd's open source Magic Cards replacement. As one can obviously guess, the bitmap fonts can't be used outside of Morrowind itself so if I wanted to make a replacer for the menu buttons that had international support I'd be out of luck since as I said I haven't been able to find a version of Magic Cards with international support.

It'd also just look great ingame, I do love me some nice, antialiased typeface. :)

EDIT: Just took a look at that Daedric font, it looks really nice! definitely going to use this somewhere.
mychaelo
Posts: 10
Joined: 08 Aug 2014, 10:55

Re: On fonts

Post by mychaelo »

Regarding the Cyrillic Magic Cards font:
There's one available at the bottom of this page http://tiarum.com/wiki/Morrowind_CS:Fonts ,
which was most probably created through a process of vectorising the original game's font. (Akella publisher made an official localisation of this game for Russia; both fonts and executable were modified in order to support cyrillics).
It's far from the best solution, but it's a good start.

Also, original font bitmaps should contain all the European diacritics you could possibly want.
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Markelius
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Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 09:13

Re: On fonts

Post by Markelius »

pvdk wrote:
Markelius wrote:I'm lead to believe Morrowind uses some kind of slightly modified .fnt format.
Don't be fooled by the extension, the .fnt format Bethesda uses is nothing like the .fnt format you're thinking of.
What I was talking about is I cannot find a program that will open it. Raster font editor claims to be able to open .fnt files, but if I try to open any of Morrowind's fonts, it gives me the error "Cannot Load Font: File is not 4096 bytes in size" or "Cannot Load Font: File is an invalid Font file or a non-supported font version". This is why I thought it might be some kind of modified font format.

All I'd like to be able to do is extract the game's Magic Cards font into a png or something so I can use it for vector tracing. I haven't been able to do that yet. There are apps like Make Mw Font and Oblivion Font Generator that can convert vector fonts to Morrowind's font format, but none that can read and extract the game's font into a viewable format.

I did find some good reading here, but it does not help what I'm doing.
pvdk wrote:
Markelius wrote:I have been able to replace the default Magic Cards font with a slightly edited version of a "Magic Cards" font I downloaded online. The font was free for personal use so it should be okay to distribute.
No, it's not. It doesn't work like that. For example, we used to ship Dongle's Daedric font, but the license said it could only be distributed as an archive. Luckly for us Ogre can read resources from .zip files, but that example shows how difficult it is to work with these custom licenses.
Shoot, that's what I was worried about. Licences for fonts on websites are often so vague, I think they don't tell you the detailed license information unless you buy the font.
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scrawl
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 11:51

Re: On fonts

Post by scrawl »

All I'd like to be able to do is extract the game's Magic Cards font into a png
I already did that, see post.
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Markelius
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Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 09:13

Re: On fonts

Post by Markelius »

scrawl wrote:
All I'd like to be able to do is extract the game's Magic Cards font into a png
I already did that, see post.
I'm confused as what to do with that xml file though. the image attachment shows up as blank too. What do I do with it?
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scrawl
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 11:51

Re: On fonts

Post by scrawl »

It's not blank, it's just white text on white forum background. It should show up properly if you load it into an image viewer that supports transparency.
onionland
Posts: 68
Joined: 29 Jul 2014, 00:43

Re: On fonts

Post by onionland »

Click on the white box beneath the xml to view the png.
Also I would recommend resizing the image before giving tracing a shot, I made a nice little workaround through vector conversion to make the edges more visible if you are interested.
I never quite realized how tiny the fonts are until now.
Attachments
blank edit file.png
blank edit file.png (69.22 KiB) Viewed 7698 times
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Markelius
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Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 09:13

Re: On fonts

Post by Markelius »

scrawl wrote:It's not blank, it's just white text on white forum background. It should show up properly if you load it into an image viewer that supports transparency.
Ah, good to know. I think I'll give tracing a shot soon. I've never made a font proper though, I've made a font for my music stuff in flash but I never managed to get it as an actual font in .otf. Should be fun then. :)

I'll see if I can't retrace the Cyrillic characters too from one of those Russian versions of the font linked above. I'd be nice to have a complete open source font replacement for Magic Cards that supports gregarian and cyrilic locales.
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scrawl
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 11:51

Re: On fonts

Post by scrawl »

Of course I had uploaded the wrong png. That one was from Better Dialogue font. How did that happen? Anyway, here's the vanilla one.
font.png
font.png (12.56 KiB) Viewed 7693 times
I could export the cyrillic variant of the font if someone send them to me.
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