Hi again, first of all thanks for the wisdom provided earlier when I asked about game localization in all its wonderful generality. Here's the link: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=357835 Well, this post is a bit of follow up to that (I didn't want to reanimate a long dead thread :P) This time the question is a bit more specific: From where should I get unicode truetype fonts? I can't seem to find them anywhere... True, there's a lot of GPL'ed ones (generally provided for Linux or other simular OS'es), but I don't want to bind myself to that license at present point, so I can't use them. Then there's a lot of shareware-like licenses... That's also a no-go. Then there's some which claim to be "free", but still have all kinds of crazy restrictions I can't live with. As I see it, I only have two possibilities if I want to use unicode fonts in my game (in which I can't afford to use money on): - There's some public domain (-like) unicode fonts out there I haven't found yet. Does anyone know of such? It would be very nice :) - Alternatively I could just use the fonts provided by the system, and live with the fact that text doesn't necesarily will look exactly the same on all platforms. Is multilangual unicode fonts a standard feature on all modern OS's? (I'm talking Linux, Windows, MacOS X, etc here). If so, is it a bad idea to use them? Okay, I guess one can assume that, for instance, if a guy who wants to run my game in vietnamese, then he'll probably have some fonts for that on his computer. But I can assume them to be truetype? Well, thank-you in advance :) Cheers, Rasmus Neckelmann

What exactly do you mean by "unicode truetype font"? Are you looking for a font that supports every single unicode codepoint?

Most apps that do heavy duty text lifting using some sort of font linking. Basically they have one font for western european, another for Japanese, another for Thai, etc, etc, and make them appear to the user as if they were all a single font.

Windows will do this for you, particularly if you have Uniscribe installed. I don't know about this level of detail on Linux or MacOS.

Whether or not you want to use the system fonts depends on what you're using them for. For most sorts of applications (including inside games) the user will probably be more comfortable if they see a font they are familiar with so that means using system fonts. For more specialized parts of the UI you might want a custom font.

Quote:Original post by SiCrane
This page may be a good starting point for some of your questions.

Most of these fonts are just Microsoft fonts, and I don't think I'm allowed to redistribute them in any other way then they're packaged know. There's also a couple of shareware fonts, but, well, yeah :)

Quote:Original post by Anon Mike
What exactly do you mean by "unicode truetype font"? Are you looking for a font that supports every single unicode codepoint?

I know that there's no fonts that support all of the unicode standard (at least not to my knowledge), I would just prefer a font which as much support as possible - maybe I should have made that clearer in the first post :)

Quote:Most apps that do heavy duty text lifting using some sort of font linking. Basically they have one font for western european, another for Japanese, another for Thai, etc, etc, and make them appear to the user as if they were all a single font.

Hmm, good idea. If I design the font system in a clever way, I can simply avoid thinking about exotic character code pages now, and postpone the troubles to later :)

Quote:Whether or not you want to use the system fonts depends on what you're using them for. For most sorts of applications (including inside games) the user will probably be more comfortable if they see a font they are familiar with so that means using system fonts. For more specialized parts of the UI you might want a custom font.

Yup.

Conclusion: Make a nice font/locale system where other fonts can be plugged in, just as easily as other languages - and it shouldn't care whether the fonts are coming from the game distribution or the system. The last part will require a bit of (evil) platform specific code, but I'll try to live with that.