Do we know how extensive the SDL fixes are? Should we expect TrueType fonts to work perfectly in all situations now?
Not sure if this information is known to the general forum population, so I'll leave it un-green now and change it if nobody knows.
By "work perfectly in all situations" do you mean "be usable for all text in the game," or "not cause the game to crash"?
Well, "perfectly" would entail both of those. I'm somewhat hoping that tilesets won't need to support text rendering in the nearish future.
I haven't found a font that fits well into the default 8x12 textbox; the text gets too small to be easy to see.
So, status: The TTF support isn't flawless yet, but it's a lot closer than it used to be.
Unfortunately I can do a strictly limited number of improvements between DF versions, since I don't have the source code to DF as such and it starts crashing if it gets too much out of sync, so this release will also mark the point where I can start working again.
I don't really remember everything I did, but going by the commit list..
- Some improvements/bugfixes to macro functionality. Meh.
- The TTF code has been.. rewritten? That's terribly vague.. well, never mind. I'm sure it's good.
- TTF has acquired a notion of tab-stops, otherwise known as colons, which makes the menus look much better.
- You can toggle TTF on and off in-game with F12.
- Strings are abbreviated in a TTF-aware manner, so they don't get truncated when the TTF usage would leave a big blank space on the right.
- TTF has acquired an 'auto' mode in addition to on/off, where it'll turn itself on if the tileset is large enough. 14 vertical pixels, by default.
Tileset creators can of course ignore the text if they want and request that users set TRUETYPE:YES.