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[Graf Zahl]

I have to concur. That uppercase-style that Georgian can use should have the same height as the other scripts - or at most the size of the tallest standard characters.
So far I only checked the Strife big font. Even for Armenian it is a lot taller than the Latin standard font. That is 14-15 pixels tall with a few exceptions up to 18 pixels - the Armenian characters are 20 pixels tall and the Georgian ones a whopping 24 pixels! That's never going to work. These tall character will totally disrupt the alignment settings for the other scripts.

[Dynamo]

*sigh* Unfortunately, I cannot say I hadn't anticipated that this problem would present itself. At the very least, is the smaller text (which is going to be used for most of the game, anyway) fine?

Well, I guess I just have to cut my losses. Thanks for checking, I will try to create a less tall font, but I'm wondering, is it possible to scale it down via some kind of TEXTURES equivalent perhaps? Also, are both Armenian and Georgian a problem here, or only the latter?

[Graf Zahl]

They are both too large. With Armenian there's also the problem of rather uneven height. As can be seen in Professor Hastig's illustration the uppercase Armenian letters should all have the same proportions, similar to how Latin works. Last but not least, the proportions should be close to the Latin font so both can coexist in the same text.

Unfortunately using texture scaling here is not an option. The font system does not support it and it'd look bad with such styled fonts.

IMO the only good approach here is to find a font with good looking shapes, then create a bitmap using that font in the desired size, using the 'generate text' function of some graphics software and work from that. You will automatically get proper size relations etc. This is how I created the lowercase Greek letters for Raven's fonts. They still needed some minor tweaks to get the proportions right

Also please note that for fonts which are uppercase in Latin we do not need any lowercase characters here as well, and logically Georgian should use the allcaps form.

[Dynamo]

Very well, I will return to this and use your suggestion to make sure I do it right. Although, I should once again ask, is the smallfont I created at least suitable enough? Since it would avoid me having to repeat that.

I will try to keep the size relative to the latin bigfont, making sure I don't go over 18 pixels. For the small font, I never went over 9 pixels, which was the vertical size for ç in the available font, so at least I think I stayed within the limits there.

EDIT: Just as a test, I've tried some resizing - grab it here - obviously it needs manual cleanup and editing, plus some of the smaller characters look way too big now so those need fixing too, but how are these sizes? Do you think this is a workable base that I can fix, or do you think I should really just start from scratch?

[Professor Hastig]

Very well, I will return to this and use your suggestion to make sure I do it right. Although, I should once again ask, is the smallfont I created at least suitable enough? Since it would avoid me having to repeat that.

Checking the available assets the answer is, unfortunately not.

All non-Raven small fonts are 7 pixels tall for an allcaps typeface that often gets used with rather tight line spacing, which is ok if the ascender and descender space is only used for accents. Raven's small font would be a bit easier because it's a lowercase typeface where several characters have ascenders or descenders, but the center part is also 7 pixels.

With the big fonts there's more variation: Doom and its offshoot games use 12 pixels, Strife 15 and Raven is again a lowercase typeface where the center part is 13 pixels tall with up to 5 pixels for ascenders and descenders.

I attached some images outlining the required proportions.

[Professor Hastig]

Here's the remaining two for the lowercase Raven fonts:

[Dynamo]

All non-Raven small fonts are 7 pixels tall for an allcaps typeface that often gets used with rather tight line spacing, which is ok if the ascender and descender space is only used for accents.

Let me discount the Raven smallfonts for now because they would technically use the lowercase versions of the Armenian letters, albeit I am not entirely sure whether this is really necessary given it's more of an extra and the capital letters would do just as fine. However, as we have seen, it is possible for the fonts here not to require the usage of descenders and ascenders: here's an example of the ç character I mentioned (9 pixels tall) being used in-game. Because there are no accents for Armenian and Georgian I don't think this would be an issue.


In the smallfont example image you provided, the first georgian letter for example is 7 pixels tall, but that basically goes out of the window the moment I add the darker outline which doom characters use stylistically, and I don't really see a way around that.

[Graf Zahl]

Those sheets obviously did not take the outline into account but they do show how the proportions of the characters should look. Although I find it doubtful that 5 pixels are enough for handling Georgian. Maybe we can get away with 8 pixels, i.e. 6 + outline

This is definitely going to be very tricky.

[Professor Hastig]

Oops, sorry. When compiling these sheets this was something I completely overlooked. Hopefully the characters still look ok at such small sizes.

[Dynamo]

Hopefully the characters still look ok at such small sizes.

They do, but the problem is the outline as noted earlier. Like Graf says, this will be tricky, and I'll need some time to think about how to approach this. I'm still not sure why the existing smallfont that goes up to 9 pixels cannot work, but if a maximum of 8 is what's needed, it does require more tinkering on my part.

[Graf Zahl]

The main problem is that the font height defines how line spacing works. Doom's smallfont has a spacing of 9 pixels so the new characters can be at most 8 pixels tall, provided that there's no ascenders and descenders in these two scripts (which seems to be the case for their allcaps look.)

And before you ask - no, that 9 pixels cannot be changed without causing major headaches.

[Dynamo]

I understand - I was led a bit astray by the fact that the ç character, in the font provided in game_support.pk3, is itself 9 pixels tall, so I was led to believe that was the tallest amount when I was making it...

[Graf Zahl]

The accented characters are also a bit taller. The thing to consider here is how the new characters interact with the ones that already exist. If they are a mismatch in size the results can look really bad if scripts get mixed.

[Tapwave]

All strings that are actually in use (i.e not marked "do not translate") should now be translated for French. There were some copy-paste errors and some localization mistakes in the Raze side, but they have been fixed, along with a few typos.

[Graf Zahl]

Thanks (to you and the others who did it for their languages)

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