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[PopTart]

I think Taffer Berlin is stunning. You have made the impossible possible. I for one don't care that the S and G look similar.

The Greek letters need some love. Especially the "pi" or whatever letter is supposed to represent cabinets in game. I'm not sure that anything like Fraktur or other blackletter traditions exist for Greek printing. You do find a font like Fraktur used for Cyrillic, which has some of the same letters as Greek, such as uppercase pi:

Spoiler: Sweet Images (click to show/hide)

[Taffer]

I prefer the regular reading letters, this one is painful and artsy (its the painful thing that's a 'con', artsy being a 'pro'). I don't even know what half the letters are supposed to be its like "is it a G or an O? or is a it a 0? No, must be a.. agh, why's it so hard!".

Thanks for the post, in any case! I'm well aware that the new font might not be for everyone, but I wanted to give it a try anyways. I might clear the centre of the letter "O" so that I can put the diagonal bar in the number "0", to make it more clear which is which.

I'm surprised you were able to make a blackletter font look so nice at such a small point size.

Here's a side-by-side of Taffer Berlin 10x10 and Lucida Blackletter 10x10 (both with Taffer colors).

Although the anti-aliased font looks a bit less pixely, the crisp 1-bit font handles scaling much better (as seen in the spoiler below).

After scaling, Taffer Berlin still looks pretty good while Lucida Blackletter is pretty blurry.

By the way, your "S" looks a lot like a "G". I guess there will be over 60 images to choose from in your pack now?

64, assuming I do end up releasing two new fonts with the same level of support. 65, if you include the "4chan" (old release) variant, but I have no interest in maintaining that one, only providing it. I'm glad that you like the font: it is hard to read. The "S" and "G" are particularly egregious, you're right: I might redraw the "S". Thank you for the critique.

Is it okay to include your tileset in Lazy Newb Packs?

By all means, go ahead! Please do. I was planning on submitting a patch once I got things sorted out more, but it would be appreciated if you went ahead and added them. I don't know what variants you want to include, but it's probably reasonable to exclude the "dwarf letters" variants, as much as I like them. Thank you kindly.

I think Taffer Berlin is stunning. You have made the impossible possible. I for one don't care that the S and G look similar.

The Greek letters need some love. Especially the "pi" or whatever letter is supposed to represent cabinets in game. I'm not sure that anything like Fraktur or other blackletter traditions exist for Greek printing. You do find a font like Fraktur used for Cyrillic, which has some of the same letters as Greek, such as uppercase pi:

Thank you for the support! I'll see about redrawing the "S" anyways. I'll definitely also improve the "pi" and other tiles: I'll probably end up redrawing them myself, but I'll look into Fraktur for ideas. The tileset definitely needs work, and some playtesting: I haven't even used it in-game yet. I pieced together all of the accented characters myself already, as the original font didn't include them.

[Droggarth]

Thanks for the post, in any case! I'm well aware that the new font might not be for everyone, but I wanted to give it a try anyways. I might clear the centre of the letter "O" so that I can put the diagonal bar in the number "0", to make it more clear which is which.

Heh, yeah, to be honest I'll never be using that medieval font style as it really is painful for me to read something and it is a major deal-breaker for me why I've never been able to play games like Ultima 7 and its expansion (believe it or not I've spent hours just trying to figure out what the npcs were saying to me in that game, really, really unpleasant, all because of letters being like chinese/japanese hieroglyphs and to add insult to injury the npcs were talking in old medieval British style).

Default letters/default dwarf letters are just fine for me, thanks. I have already difficulty reading sometimes the default stuff on-screen if there's too much text. Don't need any extra debuffs. x_x

[Max™]

I would cut a row of pixels off the upright of the d for the dorfletters, and uh... with the little .: shape as it is, it kinda looks like a flaccid cock-n-balls for the soldier dorfletter.

Naturally I'm no artist, just tried to make it a little clearer that it's a "dw" and not a dong, and played with the S a little.

[CLA]

By the way, your "S" looks a lot like a "G". I guess there will be over 60 images to choose from in your pack now?

The "S" and "G" are particularly egregious, you're right: I might redraw the "S". Thank you for the critique.

That's just how some (only German? I don't know) blackletter fonts were. I think it looks good and I think it would do the style of the font a disservice to modify it for the sake of readability for people that are unfamiliar with it.
Regardless, there are other blackletter fonts that have a more distinguishable 'S'.

[Nopal]

<Deleted>

[Taffer]

I would cut a row of pixels off the upright of the d for the dorfletters, and uh... with the little .: shape as it is, it kinda looks like a flaccid cock-n-balls for the soldier dorfletter.

Naturally I'm no artist, just tried to make it a little clearer that it's a "dw" and not a dong, and played with the S a little.

I really don't see what you mean, but I'll do another pass over the dwarf letters. Thanks for the input! I like your "S", but I've decided against changing it.

That's just how some (only German? I don't know) blackletter fonts were. I think it looks good and I think it would do the style of the font a disservice to modify it for the sake of readability for people that are unfamiliar with it.
Regardless, there are other blackletter fonts that have a more distinguishable 'S'.

You're right, now that I've had a bit of time to play with it. I'll leave the 'S' be. Thank you!

Please don't do that, take one final look at this boys...

My fortress was too young and my dwarves don't have any military knowledge. The evil necromancer Song ExolngÖ brings an army of undead goblins and we were struck down easily (he gets upsed when the dwarves are represented by letters)

All my dwarves died proud to be a "d" and not a bunch of smiley faces.

Thank you kindly for the screenshots! It's always nice to see them, especially from people using the "dwarf letters". I'm glad you like them. I'll take another look at the "Ö" letter for the next update, as it does look a little odd when placed next to the other letters.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i love Fraktur. in germany it has a rather dark past, but it's a beautiful font nonetheless.
What might fit also is a Textura Quadrata from the 14th or 15th century.
can you create one on the nonsquare sheet though? otherwise it's unusable for non-widescreens.

[Max™]

Just mean that the gap beside the bar is hard to pick out as a "dw" letter instead of a flair added to the d. I of course still love the dwarf letter concept, only reason I switched over to beards again was from finally getting them to work right with the chopped corner style I've got going.

I am also afraid that my usual methods of rescaling to nonsquare would screw up the fraktur style font.

[Pvt. Pirate]

it would have to shop every single character instead of just rescaling the whole set at once.

[jecowa]

Are the dwarf letters real text symbols, or did you make them up? They look like real text characters, so I thought they must be some kind of paragraph symbol or currency symbol, but I haven't been able to find anything else like it on Wikipedia or Google.

[Taffer]

i love Fraktur. in germany it has a rather dark past, but it's a beautiful font nonetheless.
What might fit also is a Textura Quadrata from the 14th or 15th century.
can you create one on the nonsquare sheet though? otherwise it's unusable for non-widescreens.

I'm not certain if you were speaking to myself or Max, but I don't have any plans for any non-square sheet. I have also decided to drop my plans (for now) to add a fourth font, and will focus on finishing up the gothic option when I find time.

To be blunt, I just don't have much free time at all these days, and I've invested a lot more lately into this than I intended to.

Are the dwarf letters real text symbols, or did you make them up? They look like real text characters, so I thought they must be some kind of paragraph symbol or currency symbol, but I haven't been able to find anything else like it on Wikipedia or Google.

I made them up. The fonts in all three of my tileset fonts only covered a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and a few punctuation marks. I drew all of the accented characters myself, including the dwarf letters. I just wanted a more ornate "d", to differentiate them from dogs.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i meant max, but i absolutely understand you for not always having time for "yet another project"

[Max™]

They are totally Taffer brilliance. I just pronounce it as a "dw" since that's what it suggests to my eye.

[jecowa]

Some results from a recent survey:

Launcher:

• 64% of Taffer users play without a launcher (such as the Lazy Newb Pack). The remaining 36% say they use a launcher. (This is the opposite of the norm.)
  It looks like half the people using a launcher with Taffer are using Taffer as the main tileset alongside the graphics of another pack (such as Dawn Fortress or Phoebus).

TTF:

• 92% of Taffer users play with (TTF TrueType Font) disabled. And 8% play with it enabled. (This norm for this is about 50% enabled and 50% disabled.)

Renderer:

• Half of Taffer users report that they use the "Standard" render method. 29% say they use "2D". 7% use TWBT. (Normally maybe 40% use 2D, 31% use Standard, and 26% use TWBT.)

Scaling:

• It looks like all Taffer users are probably using "Linear" over "Nearest". (79% said they user Linear; the remaining 21% weren't sure. This is pretty similar to the norm.)

Resolution:

• 57% of Taffer users have a display that is 1920 pixels wide. The remaining users are pretty evenly scattered throughout. (This is about the same as the norm.)

Dwarf Fortress version:

• 50% of Taffer users prefer to use the latest version of Dwarf Fortress even if Dwarf Therapist and DFHack haven't updated. (norm is 35%)
• 7% prefer to wait for Dwarf Therapist to update. (norm is 17%)
• 29% wait for DFHack to update. (norm is 15%)
• 14% will wait for it to be included with a launcher such as the Lazy Newb Pack. (norm is 29%)

Operating System:

• 64% of Taffer users use Windows. (norm is 86%)
• 21% use Linux. (norm is 7%)
• 14% use Mac. (norm is 6%)