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[Sowelu]

TrueType is going to take a LOT of UI work to look good.  It's an enormous technical improvement...but graphically, to me, it recalls the days of mid-90's games.  "Colonization" in specific, for some reason, and I guess Civ 2 as well.  TrueType can be pretty darn ugly in large fonts for example, and it does NOT look good in narrow windows; you really need to minimize word wrapping, and be very careful and conscientious about text placement.

Honestly, once TrueType comes in, your interface can no longer be purely utilitarian, and it requires serious, involved design work.  Much like high-color graphics, the more tools you have available, the worse they can be abused.  Fixed-width, 16-bit extended ASCII has some pretty hard lower limits on how ugly it can get...but moving up to TrueType, or 32-bit color, makes it possible to really screw things up.  Tread lightly, this is the opposite of trivial.

(All the same--excellent work!)

[MaDeR Levap]

This is exactly what is all about. True type font is official, right? This mean that Baughn and Toady will work on it and fix more after first few experimental releases.

but graphically, to me, it recalls the days of mid-90's games.  "Colonization" in specific, for some reason, and I guess Civ 2 as well. 

Well, DF itself is graphically old school. Ascii, at most tileset game.

Honestly, once TrueType comes in, your interface can no longer be purely utilitarian

Toady will try.

[Eduren]

Sowelu's point seems to be that the change will create an ongoing commitment to the UI design that cannot be fixed in a few simple releases, and would have to be constantly considered as features are added.

[Caldfir]

TrueType is going to take a LOT of UI work to look good.

I understand what you mean here, but so far all that's being done is adding support for variable-width fonts for text, NOT actually moving any of that text around, or needing to come up with crazy UI formatting rules or anything.  I'm not sure the current iteration is meant to "look good" so much as make text more readable. 

What this will do is allow the community a bit more freedom with tile sizes, since until now anything larger than 32x32 made text so cumbersome as to be unplayable.  It really is a change that is going to give the community a lot to work with, not to mention makes the game substantially more newbie-friendly, all without sacrificing any core elements of the game itself. 

It is the sort of thing that I had often wondered if it were possible to do with DF without some sort of painful rewrite, and am glad to see it was (questions about the specific amount of pain involved should be redirected to Baughn).

Personally I think that "the look" of the sample screenshot is done disservice by the fact that Times New Roman is a very ugly font when displayed on a computer screen (remember back in the '90s when all websites used TNR? tacky; very tacky).  Arial or a derivative would be much less jarring (though naturally this is a personal preference). 

In any case, I can't see anyone bothering to do any serious graphical interface work on DF until the game is tooling up for 1.0 (and I try not to worry about things that far into the future). 

[KrunkSplein]

Cue people who insist on DF's default TT Font being a beautifully-kerned Helvetica! (mouse over the comic)

[Mel_Vixen]

Well i bet that we can exchange the font-type (also size etc.) over the initfiles so if the standart font isnt t your liking you can change it.

But yes stick to something like arial or courier. 

[Sizik]

Or Terminal.

[Untelligent]

Or if all else fails we can just stick to the good ol' tile-based text.

[FuzzyDoom]

Well i bet that we can exchange the font-type (also size etc.) over the initfiles so if the standart font isnt t your liking you can change it.

But yes stick to something like arial or courier.

I like the idea of changing it based on the init file. Maybe only have a view it can change to though. You know, the basics: Arial, Times New Roman...Papyrus...

[Rockphed]

I like the idea of changing it based on the init file. Maybe only have a view it can change to though. You know, the basics: Arial, Times New Roman...Papyrus...

...Comic Sans...Please don't kill me.  It was a joke!

[Untelligent]

All will be assimilated.

[zwei]

*cough* calluna

[James.Denholm]

I, personally, would appreciate a font that was just like curses, but still a fonty font.

Which, of course, would mean that the letters could work with symbols and look nice, and that things like zeros could be replaced and text would still be text.

[Baughn]

So.. use a fixed-width font of the same aspect as the tiles?

The font is, indeed, specified in init.txt. Oh, but you can't use just any font installed on your system; I don't have any code to look those up yet. You have to put the actual font file in data/art.

[Sizik]

I, personally, would appreciate a font that was just like curses, but still a fonty font.

Which, of course, would mean that the letters could work with symbols and look nice, and that things like zeros could be replaced and text would still be text.

There do exist fonts like that.