OpenMW Font

[pvdk]

After messing aroud with this before and failing I finally managed to get a font working in OpenMW which looks like the one in Morrowind. It's a bitmap-based font which is a placeholder until we can get the original Morrowind font to work with MyGUI.

Currently it supports Basic Latin and Cyrillic characters, Latin-1 Extended can be added later. However, Central European and Eastern European characters (win1250) will be difficult because I can't find all the glyphs for that. (I don't know why OpenMW should support those right now though as Morrowind doesn't either.)

It does not use Bethesda's original font and some characters are a bit different, for example the H.
Because it's a bitmap font it's exempt from copyright.

Here are some screenshots:
Cyrillic characters
Dialogue window
Name window
Race window
Class window
Birthsigns window
Stats and Map windows

The source can be found in the mwfont branch in my GitHub repository.

[lgromanowski]

Nice, but if possible please link to old forum archive here instead of openmw.com - correct link is: http://openmw.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=47

[ezzetabi]

The Morrowind Code Patch added support for Japanese localization. Maybe we should check where they take the glyphs?

A part of that, nice work.

[corristo]

regarding MyGUI and comments in russian — feel free to contact me, I'll translate comments you need from russian

[pvdk]

The Morrowind Code Patch added support for Japanese localization. Maybe we should check where they take the glyphs

Adding support for Japanese text won't be difficult. The MCP uses a custom font file for that and we could do the same. We would also need to add the localization to the encoding options for OpenMW.
But supporting Kanji is stuff for later, first we need to support all official Morrowind localizations.

regarding MyGUI and comments in russian — feel free to contact me, I'll translate comments you need from russian

спасибо!

[Greendogo]

PVDK, did you ever get the .fnt files located in a Morrowind installation to be usable? I know there was the question of copyright when it came to using the TTF version of Magic Cards located on the internet, but using the .fnt file that is included in an install was the plan, right?

If not, Digital Monk (the guy who made the "Make MW Fonts" program, among other Elder Scrolls game utilities) said he was willing to offer code.

edit: Digital Monk says he talked to someone from OpenMW about this once (might have been you AFAIK)

[pvdk]

Well I got it working, sort of. I did use the MakeMWFonts code and a small program Peppe wrote.

The problem is that MyGUI doesn't support variable glyph heights, and "w" glyph is placed with whitespace under it instead of above it in the original .fnt file. I discussed this problem with a MyGUI dev about a year ago and I recently tried to get it working again with MyGUI 3.2, as there were some changes to the bitmap font handling, but it's still not working properly.

You can see what I mean here:

Spoiler: Show

Pay attention to the lowercase "w" in Willpower, it gets stretched because the height of the glyph is less than the font height. I tried changing it in the MyGUI source but no dice. I did however get it to work in CEGUI, but that's of no use since we're not using it.

The upside of the bitmap font I made is that it is exempt from copyright, so we can redistribute it freely. I still need to add support for Latin-1 Extended charaters and I would like to know what to do about the win1250 characters, as I can only get a subset of these to work (lots of them missing in the source fonts I use.) In my opinion we can skip them, as they are not supported in the original game and mod support is post 1.0.

[pvdk]

I cannot find a source font which supports win1250, so I decided to implement an entirely different font. It's an open-source version of the famous Garamond typeset by Claude Garamond, called EB Garamond. It supports all encodings we need and more, and it has the same feel to it as the original Morrowind font.

It also means we can finally get rid of Comic Sans, a font people seem to dislike for some reason

Very nice news, but for the love of god, please don't use Comic Sans!

Great, but NOT COMIC SANS!! Haha

Here is how it looks:

Launcher:

• Play page

OpenMW:

• Stats window
  Name window
  Messagebox
  Journal window
  Dialogue window

Oh and make sure you check the front page as we're using the exact same font there too.

There are some placement issues, but that's for the MyGUI gurus to figure out. I refer them to the garamond branch in my repo.

[sirherrbatka]

Can we stick to this font? It looks sharp, a lot better than morrowind blurry font.

There should be at least option to use this font even if we can make morrowind pixel font work.

[Zini]

Already merged into next.