SS2 special characters fonts

[673f5df175c55Chokboyz]

Tags: °fonts °SS2 °translationI've noticed that in the French SS2 translation accentuated characters were not displaying at all. Perusing the files, i quickly found that a lot of characters from the iso-8859 font used in System Shock 2 were absent (accentuated characters, the Deutsch Stzet, ...).

Using Telliamed nifty tool, i decrypted the game font files and found that those characters were mostly present in the font files but misplaced (using old cp850 encoding).
I've then proceed and made an extended set of fonts with all the iso-8859 characters (i used the original characters when present).

The installation is classic : place the .fon files in the /res/fonts folder of a mod-ready System Shock 2 installation.
The source BMP are included. Do whatever you want with both files.

Hope this will provide useful,

Chokboyz

Incomplete Preview and download below (alt download: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1XQCMJO1)

[673f5df175ef0Kolya]

Thanks a lot for your work Chokboyz, looking good.
Since this might easily come in handy with more than just the French translation I split your post off as a new topic.

[673f5df175fe4Assemblyman]

Very useful, but does it contain the Dano-norweigan letter Ø? The German and Swedish counterpart would be Ö.

[673f5df17611fZylonBane]

This seems like the sort of thing that would be perfect to include with SS2Tool.

[673f5df17624cvoodoo47]

too incomplete to have a real use.

[673f5df176339ZylonBane]

A real use other than the one described in the first sentence of the first post of this thread?

[673f5df176437Kolya]

We have quite a few translations here that work like mods, and they could include this. But I think some of them rely on the old codepage and their accented characters would break if this was made the default.

[673f5df1768b5Enchantermon]

We have quite a few translations here that work like mods, and they could include this. But I think some of them rely on the old codepage and their accented characters would break if this was made the default.

Instead of making it the default, you could only implement it if the user needs a French translation. In fact, you could integrate all of the language packs into SS2Tool if you got consent from the creators.

[673f5df176a03Kolya]

Yeah, I could, but that's a can of worms I'd rather not open. There could be several translations for one language, in which case I wouldn't know which to take, or translations that include graphics and sounds, which would blow up the SS2Tool a lot. And it would create an update relationship.
The SS2Tool is supposed to be a bug fixing tool and translations are in my view just another type of mod and they're easy enough to install that way.

My suggestion is for translators to add this extended font to their translation to make their life easier. And that's all.

[673f5df176ad3voodoo47]

agreed.

[673f5df176ecdMarvin]

I'm currently trying to improve the german translation but I cannot get the main menu to work. The umlauts don't display corectly, not even if the original OEM850 encoding is used. The .fon files here don't help either as the menu still functions even if the font.crf and all .fon files are deleted, which means that System Shock gets the appropiate files from somewhere else. Somewhere I don't know.

Any ideas?


Edit: Ah, got it, it's metafont.fon in intrface.crf. The special characters are just copied from the basic ASCII characters without actually doing anything with them. I'll try to solve it, although I'm not very much into ShockED (read: I've never done anything with it).

Edit2: Okay, converted the font to bmp with the Palette1.pal from intrface.crf but that palette apparently specifies the same colours for background/transparency and character border box:
Image: http://i.imgur.com/zMJQjz4.png

How am I supposed to edit this? The "ss" has to be changed to the narrower "ß".


Edit3: Ok, whatever palette I chose, the result is always the same: Blue, garish colours (instead of grey) without transparency:
Image: http://s1.directupload.net/images/130224/z28n3f4p.png

I'm pretty sure this task is considered trivial by experienced DromEDers. Could anyone push me in the right direction?

Edit4: Nevermind, solved it, the font should have been monochrome all along.

[673f5df17709agnartsch]

Well, you simply can not change the color in the font, since the color is set in the game.
The font just gives you the shapes of the characters.
I can barely see anything in the font which looks like öäüß, but maybe you can try to edit the text which is used in the menu (or elsewhere) and insert äöüß.
Then try to see which character from the font is used for that and modify it if necessary.
But there is also the chance that the font does not have any characters reserved for german umlauts at all.
(You might want to check the other fonts and see if any of them has any äöüß, and where they would be located within the font)

[673f5df1771cbMarvin]

As seen in the edits, I solved the problem, I just forgot to add the monochrome flag to thieffon.exe. These are the necessary steps:

1) thieffon.exe -d -m metafont.fon metafont.bmp
2) Edit metafont.bmp - GIMP can deal with it out of the box without mixing up the palette or anything
3) thieffon.exe -c -m -a metafont.bmp metafont.fon

... and then add metafont.fon to \DataPermMods\intrface\

[673f5df177490natanprog]

Hi!

I am new here 

I have this file metafont.fon(https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4Q6aFb7R-x7eGtLWTh0SXp5X2c) running smoothly
but I want to make a change in the letter "í" (Image: http://i.imgur.com/DgWmFgD.png)

I followed the procedures of the previous message, but I get a file .fon what does not (Image: http://i.imgur.com/0vL4N7j.png)

I know I do not have the necessary knowledge... maybe it's something simple

someone with the necessary knowledge, can tell me what I'm doing wrong and what should I do?

___________________________
I'm sorry for my english

[673f5df1775b4Kolya]

Mmh, for some reason it seems to drop the last 2 rows of glyphs. No idea what's going wrong here. Maybe someone with more experience in converting the fonts can help. ZylonBane?
[test.png expired]

[673f5df1776bfMarvin]

You have to use the -f option of thieffon. Converting the font to bmp gives the first character at 0x00 (=0) with 242 characters, so you actually have to give the same when converting back from bmp to fon (-f 0) even though there's nothing there. The number of characters read from the fon and the bmp file have to be the same.

[673f5df1777c5Kolya]

Ah, thanks Marv. Then this should be it. It has all 242 glyphs and I removed the i-dot since it already has an accent character. (See the screenshot above.) I guess that's what you planned, natanprog?
[metafont.fon expired]

[673f5df177915natanprog]

Thank you Kolya and Marvin 

It was exactly what I wanted

I am gathering the necessary files to complete the translation in Brazilian Portuguese

Thanks!


___________________________
I'm sorry for my english

[673f5df177af4luigge]

hello first of all sorry for reviving and old post.

I just want to know how translation works because, I downloaded the portuguese translation from natanprog and I was doing some tests and the characteres áàóòúùçÇãõâêô they do not appear in the game, and I had found out that some of these characters they appear in the game as another chartacters for example if I write á in the game shows as í, if i write à appears as á and so on.

I mean if I write on the subtitles archive, then in the game they appear as another character. I saw that in the spanish translation some characters they use an invisible character like [ ] (imagine that there is a special invisible character there). and because I'm helping the guy translating the game, just need to translate the subtitles. actually I am almost finishing the translation and just ignored these characters so brasilian words like "informação" they are like "informacao" well that is it

I didn't wanted to create another topic just to discuss this thing as I could end the discussion here. If you don't like that I am reviving this old post please ask me and I will create a new post

how can I make so the game recognize these kind of characters?

[673f5df177dadluigge]

I just downloaded your extended font file and turns out the game now recognize the characters but is still not right. I'm using the vending machine as it is the best thing to test the translation and this latin characters and now these characters 1[á] 2[à] 3[é] 4[è] 5[í] 6[ì] 7[ã] 8[õ] 9[ç] 10[Ç] 11[â] 12[Ô] 13[ô] 14[ê] 15[ú]

are appearing as 1[Ãi] 2[Ãá] 3[Ã] 4[Ã] 5[Ã] 6[Ã] 7[Ã] 8[Ãú] 9[Ã] 10[Ãç] 11[Ãó] 12[ÃÖ] 13[Ãç] 14[Ã] 15[Ã] with an à in each character, this archive changed something and I'm pretty sure that something can be made to make these chacaters to be read as all these characters are latin characters
and as iso-8859 is the extension of ascii with these special characters so that is my thought.

[673f5df177ef4voodoo47]

creating your own fonts with special characters is a long and painstaking process - you basically need to take the bmp files, and edit the characters until all are at proper places (converting the bmp into fon after each edit, and testing ingame). be prepared to sink long hours into this.

I can upload my edited stuff if you want (the attachment in the first post is not complete).

[673f5df177ffbluigge]

I would like I you can upload your stuff thanks

[673f5df178134luigge]

the thing is, the guy found out that the game uses a font with the iso-8859 so these characters should work fine but they don't that is kinda weird

I downloaded this extended font file but didn't helped as I said. except for the ñ and ¿ the portuguese linguage uses all other latin characters like çÇ áÁ àÀ éÉ ãà õÕ êÊ ôÔ etc

[673f5df178274luigge]

well except for [ý Ý]  [`y `Y]  [ñ Ñ]  [¿ ¡]  [ä ë ï ÿ ö ü]  [å Å] the rest of latin characters we use fine.