[DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Discuss translation of Daggerfall Unity and the required Daggerfall installation. Help other communities learn how to translate Daggerfall using any available tools and processes.
Post Reply
User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

[DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Hi translators,

The classic Daggerfall game was done in a resolution of 320x200, when Daggerfall Unity may be played in a much higher resolution. So it exist mods that introduce rebuild menu screens in higher resolution for DFU, the most famous being the DREAM mod that provides menu screens in 1920x1200. The screens are provided in English, so to be able to play DFU in another language, translators must suppress the texts from the DREAM images and write new texts in their own languages.

In other subjects and tutorials on the Daggerfall Workshop forum dedicated to translations, we saw how to clean the DREAM images and how to write texts on the empty screens with GIMP. The texts are written with a font named Daggerfont that was created by Jay Hova in 2018.

The glyphs in Daggerfont are very similar to the characters displayed by the classic Daggerfall, except that the glyphs are full bodied in HR when the original glyphs of Daggerfall were done into 5 pixels wide rectangles max. But the content of Daggerfont has two drawbacks:
• Almost all the accentuated letters are missing.
• The size of some letters seems too wide and produces texts that are sometimes too long in other languages than English.

So the translators must add the accentuated letters needed by their language in the Daggerfont and before that, if possible, shrink a little some letters in order to obtain a more equilibrated font.

The Daggerfont was done by Jay Hova with FontCreator, a leader on the font tools market, but this software is not free. So to modify the Daggerfont we will use the free open source font editor FontForge (fontforge.org).

You can take the file Daggerfont.otf here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16ktgV9 ... sp=sharing
To install the font into Windows, just right-click on the file, Install.

For those as me that never had a look upon font editing, you will discover that this is a technical world that has its codes and vocabulary that you never heard about before. FontForge have a detailed online documentation, alas only in English. You may also find a document named Design with FontForge that exist also in French and Chinese. I really invite you to download and read because it is an excellent introduction to font editing in general and to FontForge. If the world of font editing is totally unknown to you as it was for me, you must read chapters 1 to 5 of this book before going further.

The subject is very technical, so I have written a dedicated tutorial to explain everything with all the needed details.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RmyjhK ... sp=sharing

This is just the beginning of the complete tutorial, but as there are many information and documentation to read before being able to catch everything in this very specific technical domain, it is good to begin to put online what is written up to now.

I will inform you when the tutorial will be updated.

Have a good reding upon font editing with FontForge... for those interrested only and those who know that they will have to extend the Daggerfont to the accentuated letters that they need to write properly in their language. ;)
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Yesterday evening I changed the width of some glyphs into the daggerfont. The result is show in the subject "Translation of DREAM menu images".

The tutorial to modify daggerfont with FontForge was completed with all information needed to realize that operation.

You will find the draft2 version of this tutorial by using the same link given in the previous message.

Have a good reading. Next step shall be, at last, the way to add new glyphs for all the missing French accentuated letters in daggerfont. The procedure I will use to add French letters shall be exactly the same for all languages that use the Latin alphabet with diacritic signs.
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Hello,

I've put on line the third draft version of this tutorial.

Many pages have been added to show how to create all the needed accented glyphs in the daggerfont. All the glyphs with the accents grave, acute, diaresis and circumflex now exist for the letters a, e i, o, u and y, lowercase and uppercase.

Next time the doc will contain what I did to add the œ and Œ and to create the ç lowercase and uppercase. And after that I think that the tutorial will be finished. :)

The link to take the document is unchanged.
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

The c with cedilla, uppercase and lowercase, are done; same for the Œ.

I will not be productive this afternoon, so I prefer deposit now the draft 4 version of my tutorial.

As usual, it can be taken with the same link. ;)
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Hi,

Since Tuesday I've created the glyph for œ, generated the font in otf after having solved a set of errors, installed the new font into Window and done some first trials with this font into Word.

All this is described into additional pages of the tutorial. You can take draft 5, I recall the link toward the tutorial:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RmyjhK ... sp=sharing

You will see at the end of draft 5 that there are still some issues with the font that need to be solved: accents are not visible, lines are too near from each other, etc. Because for the moment I don't know how I will solve all this, I will have to do a set of trials up to the point when everything shall be OK. I'm not going to describe all these trials, I will write the end of the tutorial just to describe the final solutions.

Anyway the new font is usable. If some of you want to play with FontForge and/or want to see the new font, I give you links to take them: I hope to finish the work and the tutorial next Sunday or Monday. :)
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Things have changed since noon, the font now shows the accents, words are less spaced, and so on.

The tutorial did not changed, but I put on line the new font as it is now, with new links toward zip files because, due to the way Google Drive works, it will be possible to change the files without changing the link. So here are the new links: Now the main thing to do is to increase the size of the accents that are too small. It'll be my job this weekend. :)

May 1 Edit: The above links now sends to the final state of the font Daggerfall2 (see next message).
Last edited by Daneel53 on Sat May 01, 2021 3:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Here we are: the tutorial is finished as well as the Daggerfall2 font! :)

To summerize, the final links: The name of the new font has been changed to Daggerfall2 so that you can use the original font Daggerfall from Jay Hova and the new updated one.

Next step will be to use the new font Daggerfall2 in the DREAM menu screens in French. The result shall be given in the dedicated subject.

Feel free to comment the tutorial or the new font if you think something needs to be changed or enhanced. ;)
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Hello,

Ouos! There was a little error in the document produced yesterday, the word Señora in chapter 6.2 was not written with the font Daggerfall2. :oops:

Things are now correct, I put in line a fixed release of my tutorial, in date of May 2, 2021.

Apart from that, I was thinking that if somebody else wants to add new glyphs in the font for its own language (DeepFighter for German for example), it could be good to coordinate if we don't want to have several different Daggerfall fonts. The internal format of FontForge, sfdir, is simply a folder that contain a long list of files with '.glyph' extension and one file named font.props.

All those files are simple text files that can be opened with any text editor, so they are good candidates to be uploaded into a Github folder for example. To use Github would ask a certain amount of coordination and administration, not sure that we want to go toward that, but anyway it could be good to find a way to share the same font that would be valid for all languages.

I let people that may want to extend the font to their language to think about it and provide feedback. :)
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Yesterday evening, as I was writing text into another DREAM menu screen, I realized that the Hyphen-Minus sign was too long. So I've shortened it this morning, it was 5 old pixels long, now it is only three and it's better like that. After that, I shortened the Plus sign, each branch is now 4 old pixels long instead of 5. The result is better balanced than before:
WINWORD_2021-05-03_11-38-07.png
WINWORD_2021-05-03_11-38-07.png (2.35 KiB) Viewed 6193 times
I've replaced the two Daggerfall2 files that are in sfdir and otf formats, you can take them with the same link. :)
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

User avatar
Daneel53
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:15 pm
Contact:

Re: [DFUnity] How to modify Daggerfont to add new glyphs with FontForge

Post by Daneel53 »

Seems that old links for fonts are nor working anymore, so I provide them once again. Hope that now the links shall stay OK.
In charge of Project French Daggerfall and DaggerfallSetup, dev. of DFTools in English.
French translator for many Warband mods and Bannerlord.

Post Reply