Improving the small anti-aliased fonts

[664a27836fd74ZylonBane]

Been messing around this weekend with attempting to improve the anti-aliased versions of the small text fonts (mainaa.fon/dimmed.fon). While they're certainly legible, they won't win any beauty contests. Aside from being generally very sloppy-looking and not even close to having their strokes aligned to the pixel grid, they also have strange typographical issues with the lowercase characters. The b and d characters are different widths, as are p and q, and e is narrower than a, o, etc.

So I tried recreating the AA fonts, with all major strokes aligned to the pixel grid and only using greyscale for curved corners and diagonals. For the character widths, I tried several different approaches:

• Narrow. Made the lowercase characters consistent by making most of them the width of the narrow characters. This gave a nice clean look, but felt too much like Deus Ex instead of SS2.
• Wide. Made the lowercase characters consistent by making most of them the width of the wide characters. This resulted in a bloated-looking font. Also this would certainly cause text overflow in a few dialogs due to the increased width.
• Matched widths, preserving the exact widths of the original characters. This was problematic for some characters, like the m and w not cleanly fitting to the pixel grid. Overall though, it mostly didn't look terrible. I still hate the narrow e.
• Mixed widths. Left most character widths the same, only selectively correcting obvious mismatches like b/d, p/q, and the squished e. This was better than going all-wide, but still looks a bit bloated.

I hate to admit it, but my impression is that the vanilla and matched-width fonts are the most legible. I don't know if it's just years of familiarity, or the fact that the differences in character widths actually make them easier to read. Kind of like how Comic Sans is supposedly a great font for people with dyslexia.

Not sure what I'm going to do with all this. Might just abandon it.

[664a278370079voodoo47]

ouch, the fonts. the most unfun part of SS2 modding.

anyway, Matched or Wide as far as I'm concerned.

[664a27837037bsarge945]

Wide looks the best.

I was surprised the text looks so insane in Vanilla. I thought it looked all jumbled because of my crappy eyes

[664a278370475voodoo47]

hud scaling is not doing it any favors, if you have it enabled (you probably do, unless you have a manual SS2 install or disabled it yourself).

[664a2783705b9JDoran]

Yes, I'd say 'Wide' looks the best, whilst 'Narrow' looks the worst.

[664a2783706d9Valet2]

"wide" is the best.

[664a27837099cZylonBane]

ouch, the fonts. the most unfun part of SS2 modding.

It's actually really easy, IF you know the exact conversion steps to follow for each font type. Which I've thoroughly documented here.

[664a278370a87voodoo47]

I think my misadventure with the CZ translation happened before that was available.

[664a278370bbeSalk]

Mixed is my favorite. Wide second best looking but considering the drawback, I would not go for it.