OpenTTF: Open Fonts for OpenTTD

[Pipian]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I last visited and tinkered a bit with some code, (back before Unicode was actually implemented...) but I've come back to drop a little tantalizing hint of something I suddenly got the urge to do yesterday (sorry for breaking the table!):

http://www.pipian.com/stuffforchat/openttd_1.png

With luck, this will make up for not actually putting my old Cyrillic and Greek newspaper fonts to use...

[Pipian]

Just finished coding up the initial Latin alphabet...

Take a look:

Original:


Bitmap Test:


Anti-alias Test:


Yes, I know spacing is weird because of the punctuation.

[StopRightThere]

It certainly seems to be looking good so far, did you create the fonts yourself? Perhaps reduce the spacing of the letters, though, as it looks a bit too big?

[Pipian]

Already tweaked a bit, mostly fixed left bearings and ascent/descent values (and added a temporary period and exclamation mark to fix some of the misalignment. They'll be cleaned up eventually), so it's not AS wide...




It's still got some issues with wide character spaces (characters SHOULD have as much space between them as their serifs are tall, but for some reason that's not happening) and positioning (height's almost right +/- a pixel, which I can't seem to actually peg right, but I OpenTTD also renders TTF text two pixels lower than it should, which causes the last 'y' to dangle into the image rather than be on the white.).

[Pipian]

And yes, I made the outlines of the fonts entirely on my own, just tracing the original bitmaps of the letters (but not for all of them).

I intend to release the font under SIL's Open Font License, so it can be distributed along with OpenTTD. Only trick is whether or not the face is copyrighted in your country or not. Here in the US, the font is most definitely not copyrighted, so the TTF version should be completely legit (tracing it from the bitmaps MAY break copyright, but the 1998 precedent was set for making outline fonts from looking at outline fonts rather than bitmap fonts, but I'm pretty sure it's fine.)

In Britain, however, the font in TTD is most likely under copyright, as typeface designs are afforded copyright in Britain (retroactively from 1989), so the font, being based on the original OpenTTD font (and traced from it), may still violate copyright in countries that view fonts as copyrightable material (France and Germany, in particular).

[zypa]

The last two images look really great! Cool!

[Born Acorn]

Please try not to break the tables, it really annoys everyone and then we moderators get reports up the wazoo.

[Pipian]

Apologies for that.

Currently got digits and some analphabetics done. Still need to do about 20-25 analphabetics and the accented characters before I put out the first alpha. I'll probably put out two versions, one to try to be as 'authentic' as possible to the original accents and character spacing, and one that takes a little more leeway to have more 'understandable' accents and utilizing kerning.

After that's done, it's on to greener pastures with the addition of accented characters beyond those provided for in the GRFs, beginning first with those currently required for translations, and aiming eventually for the twin goals of WGL4 compliance and translation-completeness. I don't intend to ever support CJK characters with this font regardless of those used in translations, however.

[CMircea]

I would love to see sub-pixel rendering as well.

[DaleStan]

Sub-pixel RGB order or sub-pixel BGR order? And over what background; sub-pixel glyphs rendered over white won't look quite so good on the red error boxes.

Not to mention that TTD glyphs are 1-bitmaps; a pixel is either part of a letter or it isn't. All pixels that are part of the letter get changed to the specified color, and all other pixels get left alone

[Pipian]

Not only is sub-pixel rendering highly subjective due to the design of the LCD, but it has nothing to do with the actual font DESIGN. It's only a matter of how the font is rendered, which has nothing to do with what I'm making.

[Pipian]

Progress update: Almost all of ASCII is done. I just need to finish the characters @ \ ^ ` { } and ~. Then the default accented characters (56 of them, but all I really need to do is draw accents, as the letter bases need little changing), guillemets, and the cent sign before I match the default font's character set. Then there's a couple other characters that are in openttdw.grf (Euro being the main one), but then it'll be ready for alpha.

[FooBar]

I really appreciate the time and effort you're putting into this, but don't expect that your font will ever be included with OTTD, mainly because of the reason you pointed out yourself:

In Britain, however, the font in TTD is most likely under copyright, as typeface designs are afforded copyright in Britain (retroactively from 1989), so the font, being based on the original OpenTTD font (and traced from it), may still violate copyright in countries that view fonts as copyrightable material (France and Germany, in particular).

[Pipian]

Yeah. The worst part is that there's almost no legal precedent on the topic of translating font designs that were originally bitmap designs to TrueType. Though a fair amount of evidence in the US at least points to traced bitmaps as being entirely acceptable, there's almost nothing that really gives any proof as to the legality of doing so in Britain, if the font was never available in TrueType form.

I'll keep making it, but people in Britain, France, Germany, and any other country where typefaces are copyrightable may not import the font for their use until 2020 (according to UK copyright law, typefaces are under copyright for 25 years from the end of the year they were first marketed, in this case, until January 1, 2020, due to TT's original release in 1994.) Americans will be free to download and use the font, however.

This of course goes out the window if someone can prove that the font design in TTD was taken from a font created even earlier. Century Schoolbook (included with Windows) is a reasonably close facsimile, but there are some features of the TTD font that Century Schoolbook does not have. If it were considered Century Schoolbook, however, then my font would be not under copyright as it was made in 1919 in America.

Of course, the other question is 'How legitimate are the Euro characters in openttdw.grf?'

[Pipian]

Finished the initial slate of accents. Here's a couple of samples, and the alpha font. I've taken a couple of liberties with the accents on the lower case, and they may need a little bit of fixing before putting out the actual alphas for download.

German:



French:



Icelandic:

[Pipian]

Sorry I haven't said much of late. Been working (and recently finished) additional accents that SHOULD allow all existing Latin alphabet-based languages to render properly. This means all languages except Bulgarian, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Ukrainian should work now. Icelandic, Lithuanian, and Polish may not work completely though, due to missing a couple of special punctuation characters.

I'll put up the font thus far (with the punctuation characters added) and a couple of screenshots soon. Greek is next on the agenda (and will probably be done for the first alpha release), followed by Cyrillic.