Specal characters in books? : III

» Thu Aug 20, 2009 12:37 am

Almost every book in Morrowind (except those in Daedric) is prefaced by a tag , so I suppose Magic Cards is the font used in books. But when I check it in Windows' Character Map utility, it shows special symbols (like "skull", "comet", "tree", "drop", etc.) in place of characters [, \, ], _, {, |, }. When I place these characters in book's text, though, they display like regular "[" or "]". What if I *do* want special characters displayed in my book?

» Thu Aug 20, 2009 2:14 am

you could try exporting your Windows font in Morrowind format using the http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Utilities.Detail&id=69 utility, problem is it needs to modify Morrowind.ini.
There are other limitations...

Posted by DigitalMonk at 2009-04-02 07:32:10
Morrowind has strange limitation in the bookfont system. A book says that it wants to use a particular font (say, "Century Gothic" -- I'm doing this away from my gaming machine, so I'm going to get the names and font number wrong, but bear with me). Morrowind is HARD CODED to know that "Century Gothic" is (let's pretend) Font #1. It then uses the font that was loaded as Font #1, even if you have used my tool to make that be "Party Time Balloon Letters".

The practical upshots are:

* there are only three fonts that can be referenced at all.

* those three fonts are set up globally in the .INI file

* your book specifies the font it wants by the original font name, rather than the number (it may be possible to specify it by number as well)

* all together, this means that you cannot release a mod that has the Necronomicon in "Bloody Fingerprint 18" font. The best you could do would be to have your book use Daedric, provide your font as generated by this program, and suggest that the users might want to "install" the font -- even though it will turn ALL Daedric books into your new font.

I *really* wish that Bethesda had provided an arbitrary "font style"->"font name" mapping, so that books could have their own fonts, but it just doesn't work that way...

» Thu Aug 20, 2009 4:51 am

I might, but the "3 fonts per game" makes it not worth the trouble. Besides, I'm talking about accessing characters *already* present in Morrowind's own fonts.

» Wed Aug 19, 2009 11:37 pm

I believe the special characters you are speaking about are not present inside Morrowind standard fonts (Data Files\Fonts\Magic_Cards_Regular.fnt, Data Files\Fonts\Magic_Cards_Regular_0_Lod_A.tex). When you use a WIndows application you are probably seeing another similar .ttf font with the same name (I'm assuming "Magic_Cards") with the extra characters.
Try this: use the MakeMWFonts to generate the Data Files\Fonts\Magic_Cards_16.fnt, Data Files\Fonts\Magic_Cards_16_0_Lod_A.tex from the .ttf,
change in the Morrowind.ini

[Fonts];Font 0=magic_cards_regularFont 0=Magic_Cards_16

and try typing your special chars [] ingame, for instance in in a map note...

» Thu Aug 20, 2009 2:41 am

I did that, and you're right... which is strange, considering that Magic Cards font I have is exactly the one I got from my Morrowind CD, so it's supposed to be the correct font. *shrug* Oh well.

» Thu Aug 20, 2009 5:12 am

I did that, and you're right... which is strange, considering that Magic Cards font I have is exactly the one I got from my Morrowind CD, so it's supposed to be the correct font. *shrug* Oh well.

There's a .ttf on the TESCS CD? You didn't download http://www.dafont.com/magic-cards.font?

» Thu Aug 20, 2009 6:39 am

No, it was on the CS disk, in the BookArt folder, along with two other fonts

» Wed Aug 19, 2009 10:09 pm

... huh. :huh:

Looking through them, I suspect that they're identical... I don't suppose you've tried hex editing the ESP (or using Enchanted Editor) / using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_printable_characters? :unsure:

» Wed Aug 19, 2009 7:53 pm

Looking through them, I suspect that they're identical...

Quite possible. But the Magic Cards.ttf turned out to be not identical to Magic_Cards_Regular.tex. At least, when opening the latter by mwfv011 viewer, I haven't seen those characters, but saw normal []\|{}.

I don't suppose you've tried hex editing the ESP (or using Enchanted Editor) / using entity references with the code numbers?

*shrug* And what code numbers would I use? Those symbols I mentioned are not listed in regular charts, and in Magic Cards.ttf they take place of primary ASCII characters.