Comment and suggest away please!

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=479

http://static.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/images/479-1-1325973868.jpg

Current version 3.1.0


AUTHOR'S NOTE

Fonts are awesome and integral to gaming experience and sadly nowadays often overlooked in importance. I'm one of those people who think that Bethesda's choice of typeface in Skyrim is rather lacking and immersion-breaking. The whole thing looks a bit too Assassin's Creed-ish to me. While waiting for a proper UI overhaul, I decided to make this little mod mainly for myself.

This mod replaces Skyrim's in-game UI font with something (IMO) more appropriate for the time and space of the game. It goes a little bit further than just replacing the typeface. My approach is to avoid resizing font as much as possible and instead relies more on tweaking the layout files in order to maintain readability. Even then the resulting font might be a bit too small for some people's taste. The downside of this is that it breaks compatibility with mods that use the same source files. It's nothing that can't be fixed by a compatibility version though. Here's hoping that there's somebody here who can enjoy it.

VERSION 3 NOTE

Version 3! There's a new font in the house - Fertigo Pro. You will see this used for (most) numbers and SkyUI's inventory list. I also remastered the main font - new glyphs for numbers and some attempt to fix irregular character height. It might be worse than before though. I don't really know as my mind is now clouded with all the details. Oh, non-widescreen resolutions are supported now BUT it breaks compatibility with any mods altering lockpicking and skills menu so pick your poison. The download can be found in Optionals section.


DISCLAIMER

This mod is provided as is. I am just a hobbyist at best and I do not have any professional education in game design whatsoever so pardon me if my work appears amateurish. As long I am playing this game/there's interest in the mod/there's no DarN mod it is very likely that I will keep tab on this mod. If you'd like to use this mod or any part of it in your work I'd appreciate it if you can drop me a short message.


3.0.0/3.1.0 LOG

Version 3.1.0

• Tweaked numbers and a several other glyphs

Version 3.0.0

• Added support for SkyUI
  
• Added a new font - Fertigo Pro
  
• Added support for non-widescreen format
  
• Remastered the main font - new glyphs for numbers
  
• Fixed overlapping enemy names (optional download)
  
• Various fixes and tweaks to interface files

KNOWN LIMITATIONS/ISSUES/TO DO

• Texts might appear smaller then they were in vanilla. If you cherish consolish gigantic fonts or you have bad eyesight then this might be an issue. Bad joke aside, readability is definitely worse than vanilla especially on lower resolutions. This shouldn't be a big problem for the bigger resolutions though.
  
• This mod does not support Czech, Polish and Russian language. Try as I might I just do not have the capacity to provide support for these languages as it is very hard to do tests. If somebody's willing to port the mod for other languages just drop me a message so I can give you the source files and prepare the font for you.
  
• Clipping issues might still occur if you're playing non-English versions or using other fonts.
  
• Letters might appear irregular at certain resolutions.

FEEDBACK/BUG REPORTS

I'm welcoming all ideas and if you come across any issue you can inform me in the comment page or through PMs on Nexus or here.


CREDITS

Bethesda: thank you for svcking so many hours out of my life
Valistar: his mod get me to learn this stuff. Check out http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=95 for more font options.
Font authors!
All the users who reported bugs and flaws: Thank you!

Looks amazing. Here's a higher resolution screen, and an awkward size one at that.
http://i.imgur.com/8ytSy.jpg 1824x1026

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!

I just made a post in one of the UI overhaul mod threads saying they need to replace the Sans-Serif font with a Greek-Serif. Such a small change, such a big difference in bringing menus from "futuristic Fallout" to "medieval Skyrim".

I'll be downloading this when I get home.

This is really cool.

I might try it out, but to be completely honest, the ultimate font mod in my opinion would be the Magic Cards font from Morrowind *hint hint, nudge nudge*.

I have used this mod for some time now, and I must say - I love it. I am one of the few people it seems
that actually likes the new UI (even though the suggested one with pictures in one of the threads here
look absolutely amazing) but if there was one thing I wasn't that keen on, it was it's way too modern
font. This excellent mod by Fhaarkas takes care of that for me. It looks great in game! Much more in
line with the overall setting of an old fantasy world.

Thank you for your time and effort and for sharing this with us Phaarkas!

Why thank you! I don't have a high resolution monitor so I never know how it'd look. Glad it worked out. Thanks again!


Welcome aboard . Hopefully you'll like it.


Having never played Morrowind (I know, I know), I don't really have an extensive experience with Magic Cards but from what I see the font is a bit on the wide side so I'm gonna have a real good fun trying to scale it *hint hint*


Cheers!

Version 1.1 update

This is a small update and not essential but it does introduce a new file - hudmenu.gfx. If you're using any HUD mod this update may not be compatible. You can still apply the update to favoritesmenu.swf though.

• (hudmenu.gfx) - Increase the font size of ammo count (too small in lower resolutions)
  
• (favoritesmenu.swf) - Tweaked the spacing between letters in Favorite menu (inconsistent with ammo count text)

Cheers. I need the favoritesmenu file, but I use the no stealth version of hudmenu, so sadly that's out of the question.
Great work, as always!

Thanks . I should add that the font size increase shouldn't be too important for those gaming on high resolution as it should be clear enough in the old version. If you're one then you're not missing much .

I really like the font, but including so many files in the mod seems a bit wasteful to me. I usually think its best to mod as less files as in any way possible. I'm currently just using the "fonts_fh.swf" and "fontconfig.txt" files and in a quick test everything looked fine to me. Are the tweaks made in those other files really important enough to sacrifice mod compatibility?
Sure, its easy to figure out which files to leave out or in which order to install mods at the moment, but as the number of mods grows, things will get more and more complicated. Thus it is usually best to keep it as simple as possible, in my opinion.

Looks great! While I actually do like the look of the default font, this looks great as well. I'll install it and try it out.

TL;DR - those files are fixes for minor issues pertaining to using a wider font. It matters to some, not to others and if you're in the latter group that's awesome! The main files are fine for 90% of time and all those extras are just for the remaining 10%. It's overkill, sure but perfecting something comes at a steep price I guess. The only reason I bundled them all together is because I don't want my work to come off as half-baked. Things will get better down the line though so I wouldn't worry too much at this point.
************
The love letter version -

Thanks for your feedback . I cannot agree more with you and it is always my intention to make my mod as compatible/simple as possible. Are those extra files necessary? That's a very good question and a very legit concern (note to self - FAQ). Please bear with me as I'm not very good at being cohesive.

As it stands, the only core files of the mod are "fonts_fh.swf" and "fontconfig.txt" and most other files are just fixes for cut-off texts issue. There are three ways around this issue from what I can see -

• Reduce the font glyphs' size until they fit all the text fields. This will greatly sacrifice readability and aesthetics for minor issues (e.g. cut-off dates and texts in save/load list, texts scaling to too small a size etc ) which only happens in just a fraction of the UI. It's a case of burning a house down because of some errant rodents.
  
• Use a narrow font to cater to vanilla's measurements. This is purely a design choice.
  
• Modifies the .swf's. This will keep the intended font size in general where you just tweak what's giving you issues. It's the only way to keep readability and aesthetics in check but will spur a whole lot of compatibility problems.

The simple way would be to go with the first route. This just doesn't cut it with me. I want to be able to use a regular serif font but I'm not keen on having all the letters in pinhead size. Plus Valistar's mod already covers this and his mod is about as good as it get.

The third route gives me all I could possibly want with changing the UI. I am still very much new to modding and still learning to do stuff and #1 would've been too boring for me I'm also a perfectionist of some sort (it's taking me an hour to write this and I'm still single) so no half-baked solution for me. Without all those extra files I would essentially be breaking my own philosophy and the work would feel very unfinished. It would be ironic too if I set out to fix something that breaks immersion (this is an opinion) and ended up producing something that breaks them even more glaringly. As stated in the description, it might not be to everyone's taste though.

An ideal solution for me would be to have a centralized config file for text formatting (I don't know if it's possible but something along the line of Rainmeter's approach would be nice). This will effectively eliminate the need for multitudes of unnecessary files and will be a much, much cleaner solution for font modders.

If that's not happening, my end goal regarding compatibility would be to release a compatibility patch for each (popular) conflicting mod, author and time permitted. I'll probably look into making an installer too further down the line so that users will have an easier way to choose what component they want installed. We're talking about something that won't be happening sporadically (i.e. more mods) for probably a few months though so for now this will do I guess. With that said at the very least this mod would provide something for those who are not keen on vanilla's font but still want to use its layout.

OMG I just wrote an essay @,@ but I just want to make clear that I was making concious decisions and there is just no better way to go around it at the moment.

I hope you'll like it!

Wow, this looks really nice. It's surprising how well the UI lends itself to both serif and sans-serif fonts.

Is it possible to reduce the fontsize? I hope this would reduce scrolling (inventory, dialogue options and so on...).

Nice name for your character

Thanks! I thought it fit him

New version is up. Perhaps the only big change is the new font for handwritings. I hate the vanilla handwritings.

I'm not entirely sure about that. While it's absolutely possible to further reduce the font size, for lesser scrolling you'd have to modify the text fields and I haven't got my head around it yet.

Handwriting looks beautiful. Jeez. Completely sold.

Please report if you found anything out of place from using the new handwriting font. Checking every single notes/letters there are would have been too time-consuming for me alone so I might miss any error.

Version 2 is up. Screens of main load screen and in-game load/save screen (fixed clipping issue for wider fonts) -

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/630731953330508592/5BD4077360390D9946FE6B75CF96909299F4B924/
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/630731953330507002/454D50E70BFBFCF91B02FF6016B91F7A63735D1C/

EDIT: http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/630731953330889863/0D89E4ABD352E1E10BA8848C10CC2355EAD41A66/

I'm rather curious to see how the files would work with other fonts.

New version. There's a bug I noticed with long dates - will be fixed in the next update.

Version 3.1.0

• Tweaked numbers and a several other glyphs

Version 3.0.0

• Added support for SkyUI
  
• Added a new font - Fertigo Pro
  
• Added support for non-widescreen format
  
• Remastered the main font - new glyphs for numbers
  
• Fixed overlapping enemy names (optional download)
  
• Various fixes and tweaks to interface files