Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to help

[Professor Hastig]

What I collected there is the entire set of both uppercase and lowercase letters. So which one is needed depends on the font. I guess to save work we can use uppercase exclusively, even for Raven and not bother with lowercase at all.
The և seems to be a regular letter that developed out of a ligature - not unlike the German ß. In uppercase it will get decomposed again into its two originating letters, as I posted.
Far more tricky will be the punctuation marks here, because they are very different from other alphabetic scripts and also hard to distinguish in a small pixel font.

[Dynamo]

According to Wikipedia, these are the ones I should focus on:

[ ՜ ] The yerkaratsman nshan (which looks like a diagonally rising tilde) is used as an exclamation mark.
[ ՛ ] The shesht (which looks like a non-spacing acute accent) is used as an emphasis mark.
[ ՞ ] The hartsakan nshan is used as a question mark.
[ ֊ ] The yent'amna is used as the ordinary Armenian hyphen.

As the rest is either too similar to English (but interestingly . and : are swapped in their usage) or obsolete within the language itself. I'll get to work on that now, shouldn't be too bad.

EDIT: And here it is:



I think the punctuation symbols look pretty distinct even in the smaller font. Regarding the alternate version of և, should I just merge the two for a unique character, or should that be handled some other way?

I'll try to make the Heretic, Hexen and Strife versions of these fonts soon.

[Professor Hastig]

Do we have any Armenians around? They would know best what to do here with that lowercase-only character.

Regarding the uppercase variant, if the two-character form is needed it's probably something to answer by the developers, but from my understanding making a composite glyph would be easiest because it avoids coding a special case for it.

[Dynamo]

Here is the Heretic version for the Georgian and Armenian upper fonts. Mikolah helped me out a bit with the outlines for this one, but it was a quick and speedy process that I think came out very well. What do you think? Gonna work on Hexen and Strife next.

EDIT:


And the Hexen version. Worth noting that both Heretic and Hexen are already under the palette too.

EDIT 2:


And here is the Strife font, with help from Mikolah. I think this came out very faithful. I'd like to hear thoughts on all three

EDIT 3:


And Chex Quest as well! This one entirely by Mikolah.

[Professor Hastig]

Those all look really good. For the small fonts it should be possible to use recolored versions of Doom's. Which would leave Strife's tiny font as the last one remaining, but that one may be hard due to its size.

[Dynamo]

Thanks! I agree, the small doom font can be adapted to all the other games easily, but the strife message text appears to be the one exception in that regard. Other than that, I'd say it's basically complete. We'll see what I can cook up for that one in the meantime, but given the state of things, it'd be nice if support could be added to the docs already, so that translation text can begin to be added there independently of the (95% complete by now) fonts.

[Graf Zahl]

Someone has to cut out and import all those characters. That's going to be quite a bit of work.
Any volunteers?

[Dynamo]

I can cut them all out into individual files, but should I respect any kind of naming convention, or would you be able to do so yourself?

[Graf Zahl]

The naming convention is that each single file needs to be named with a 4 digit hex value of its character's Unicode code point.
For the y-offsets they need to be set so that the characters align properly with the existing set.

For the allcaps fonts we do not need the lowercase letters and for Raven's Smallfonts we do not need the uppercase letters.

[Dynamo]

Ok, I cropped and renamed everything into individual files (also with a couple of extra characters I had forgotten to add to the preview sheets).

Here it is

This does not have the y-offsets because truth be told I'm not really sure what that entails, maybe an example can be provided? And also, this doesn't have the small strife font that's used on the mission briefing. Everything else is here, and I think it can be implemented already provided there's no outstanding issues.

[Graf Zahl]

Hm. On one hand, thanks for the work, on the other: since now all characters are cropped to their actual content I have no idea how to offset them from each other.
The very least I need is the relative offset from the top line of the script a character belongs to.

[Dynamo]

I should clarify one thing just in case: when I uploaded the sheets here, they were purely for demonstrative purposes, and the vertical placement of the graphics in no way represented the way they're set in their alphbets.

Now (and provided I understand this correctly - sorry, but I'm really not well versed in the technical side of this unfortunately), considering that most of the characters are rather tall to begin with, I'd say it's best to assume that the bottom pixel is the bottom baseline, because I think for both the bigger and the smaller font, that might cause text to block the text below, unless there's some in-engine handling for this that I'm not aware of, in which case I'm sure I could find some arrangement.

[Professor Hastig]

Here's an image visualizing the base and top lines for Armenian. I hope this helps. The lines are not perfect but should be good enough to see which characters have ascenders or descenders. At least for capital Armenian it looks very simple - all characters have typical uppercase size and no descenders - just like basic Latin.

Georgian looks a bit problematic. If the size is correct it means that almost all characters are having descenders. This may cause issues with font spacing

[Dynamo]

When I was first looking into the font, I saw this (don't mind some of the shapes being quite different - there's lots of ways to write the georgian script and I went with what I think looked best given the circumstances):

As you already know, there are no small or capital letters in Georgian. However, some fonts achieve a capital-like effect by giving the same height to all letters. This effect is very common on road signs, titles, etc.

The thing is, I think most of the characters already abide to the system seen on the right except for a few, which I personally believe look fine as they are anyway. Again though, all this depends on whether the text would be blocked or not.

[Professor Hastig]

In that case the Georgian characters are too tall, I think. They should be the same height as the Armenian (or the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek) capital letters.