PSP fonts - replacement font?

[Sarisa81]

http://sourceforge.jp/magazine/09/04/27/0313213 is a good reference for anyone working on a replacement Japanese font: it's a list of well-known Japanese open-source fonts (as of four years ago), along with specimina. http://wiki.fdiary.net/font/?freefont also has a list of free fonts, with much but not total overlap.
Even Wikipedia has a list, but it doesn't help with hunting down the fonts: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/フリーフォント
Articles are in Japanese.

[[Unknown]]

So, the condensed ones are too short. Orbitron's width is pretty good, though. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an italic... guess I could do a faux italic? But it's also missing a lot of e.g. accented characters.

For metrics high level on the base font, it seems like T should be square, M should be 7:6, S should be 5:6, o should be square, m should be 3:2, etc. These are all rough.

In the sentence "This game's system data uses the aut" (the larger font cuts off in the game I was testing here, it wants to use small bold), the w/h ratio should be about 21.

Personally I don't really care about making the font look similar, I'm mostly concerned about getting a font that has the same basic size characteristics. A font that is too tall compared to its width is just going to render wrong in some games, no matter what we do.

-[Unknown]

[Sarisa81]

So you don't care about the appearance, you want a font with similar or, at best, identical metrics ("metric compatible")? That makes perfect sense, but I'm not sure where to start looking. Getting the metrics from a font you've downloaded can be done, but I can't think of any way to search by metrics.

Why is "too big" an issue, anyway? TrueType is a vector format; the whole idea is that the letters can be shrunk or expanded to any size requested. Does the TTF->PGF tool only take a hard-coded point size?

Are there any tools for working with PGF fonts directly? I've seen tools for vector to PGF font conversion, but nothing else.

[[Unknown]]

These are the only tools for PGF I know of:
https://github.com/tpunix/pgftool

Some things have to be massaged though, like trimming space around chars, tweaking ascenders, etc. But the tool works well.

PGF is raster, but it uses 26.6 and games often check the metrics. The problem with "M ight" and such is 100% incorrect metrics in the PGF afaict, but the other problem is that games hard wrap, and they also allot only a fixed amount of width/height for the text. I don't want to spend a bunch of time getting the ascender and etc. correct on a font that's gonna have other issues anyway.

If the game hard wraps, a thin font will end up looking really funny. It may also have to be nearly unreadably small to be short enough that it fits in the vertical space its allowed. This can even be a problem for soft wrapping.

The metrics really don't need to be identical, but yeah, similar is what I'm shooting for. I also have no idea how to find fonts based on metrics...

I think that luckily, this doesn't really affect CJK fonts, because those are usually square (I think?) It's only really Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/etc. that this is a problem for.

-[Unknown]

[Sarisa81]

Varying character widths are a problem for everything but CJK fonts, and for professional graphic artists Japanese kana need careful space management. But at this level CJK characters can be treated as squares.

There are lots of systematic ways to measure font metrics; they can be very precise, but PANOSE (a font-matching system) would at least narrow the list down to somewhat similar fonts. I PANOSEd New Rodin DB and got 2B74222824, which gives a pretty detailed image of the font but doesn't help that much since you can't search by PANOSE (or anything else, but PANOSE is the most likely).

If someone has a huge pile of fonts on their computer and can see if anything similar to that comes up, please let me know.

Oh, one thing I forgot to write down that might be useful: calculated relative to em-height (as on http://brunildo.org/test/xheight.pl?), New Rodin's x-height is 0.587, larger than DejaVu Sans at 0.547 and far larger than Liberation Sans at 0.518. In fact, it's an extremely large x-height, which might be why you're having so many problems with fonts being "too big" -- the PSP font's caps are very, very short. The only thing I've seen with a larger x-height is Vectora, which has an x-height (measured traditionally) of 0.83 (by that standard New Rodin is ~0.75). Needless to say it's not free.

[Sarisa81]

I'm trying out some free fonts noted as having large x-heights.

Merriweather: 0.546. About the same as DejaVu. Good coverage, but DejaVu has good coverage too.

Actor: 0.503. Odd for a font that claims to need lots of leading. Low cap height with high ascenders?

Poly: 0.473. I shouldn't have had high expectations for a serif. (Also, it may have been designed with a lot of extra room above the letters for accents, since it's intended for American languages.)

Signika: 0.495. Again, this is NOT a large x-height!

At the rate this is going, you might end up cutting down DejaVu Sans to fit, or adding accents to Orbitron. (As-is, DejaVu Sans will be a big improvement over Liberation Sans, but it's not metric compatible.)

[Sarisa81]

Are copyrighted fonts now acceptable candidates for a replacement font? The current builds are using Chinese fonts converted from the copyrighted fonts FZ-CuYuan and Microsoft YaHei.

This opens up a much wider range of fonts if all fonts are on the table except Sony's own files.

[[Unknown]]

Yes and no. I guess I should be clearer about this.

If you have a copyrighted font, and you generate a bitmapped version of it, this is typically completely okay. As long as you properly licensed the font, it's normally allowed to distribute a rasterized version of it.

However, that means no one else can reasonably update it, without also obtaining a license of their own. I'm currently not very interested in purchasing some font with my own money (I keep recreational spending to a budget that I'd rather use on other things) for the purpose of perfecting the pgf conversion/rendering and manually tweaking some of the ascenders.

Of course, freely available fonts such as Arial aren't problems, even if they are not openly licensed fonts.

-[Unknown]