Talk:Standard Galactic Alphabet

Somewhere I found a fan community that had extrapolated the SGA system into punctuation. I can't seem to find the page now, but they had brackets, a comma and an apostrophe worked out.--DHeadshot 13:05, 14 July 2009 (GMT)

Fonts

I've created a new SGA font designed to be closest to the original in-game text. It is restricted to only the charaters that appear in-game, with no inventd ones to fill the other spaces. The letters are pixel-to-pixel copies of those on the chart in Keen 3 and the other characters are the signposted ones from Keen 1, re-scaled to match. I attempted to get the rescaling as close as possible by analysing the differences between the 2 character sets, however it is not as accurate as the letters. Unused character slots are filled by the character the software used defaults to. The font is downloadable here - feel free to rehost it yourself for convenience. It was created using Fontstruct. -- DHeadshot 15:59, 31 March 2010 (GMT)

I've mirrored it and added a link, thanks. Shame it only works properly at 16pt though. I can recommend FontForge if you feel like making any more fonts! -- Malvineous 08:06, 10 April 2010 (GMT)

It works fine on my machine. 12pt is the exact copy of the Keen 3 character set. -- DHeadshot 17:11, 10 April 2010 (GMT)

This looks fine to me... -- DHeadshot 17:25, 10 April 2010 (GMT)

I don't think it's a proper TrueType font, because even the files in the readme state that it looks best at 16pt. On my PC it came out as normal English text on all sizes except 16pt. If you look at your image too, none of those look like they're straight out of Keen, they're all antialiased and look blurry (particularly the two dots on the letter C.) You might be better off creating a bitmapped font instead of a TrueType one, given the underlying text is bitmapped. -- Malvineous 00:53, 11 April 2010 (GMT)

The image is a TIF - you get artifacts. view it at 12pt in paint. It's identical. -- DHeadshot 11:49, 11 April 2010 (GMT)

Proof! Proof of proof! -- DHeadshot 11:57, 11 April 2010 (GMT)

TIFFs don't give artefacts, they use lossless compression. Your paint image is 16-colour, so antialiasing is disabled. Try it in a word processor, preferably zoomed in to more than 100%. That's just the nature of TrueType fonts. The problem with the size is that the font appears to be designed for 16pt viewing, and you've designed the glyphs larger than they need to be. So it needs to be shrunk down to 12pt to display at the correct size, but because the font is lacking 12pt detail that only works in some programs. To be fair it's probably because Linux is pickier than Windows about drawing fonts, but it's still an issue with the font (well, the program that created the font.) Even the readme file says it's primarily designed for use in Flash, so it's no surprise there are issues elsewhere. But if it works well in MS Paint and that's all you need to use it in, then it's not really a problem... -- Malvineous 13:05, 11 April 2010 (GMT)

The TIF is a print-out from Word (MS Document Imaging, remember?) thereby showing the thing works fine in office. It works OK in a standard Windows textbox at any size, though like most fonts it does distort at the more extreme ends of the size scale. Therefore, I am justified in saying it is a fully fledged Windows font. Linux may be different, but my guarantee does not extend to it. -- DHeadshot 15:09, 13 April 2010 (GMT)

I never disputed that it works under Windows, I just pointed out that it's not as compatible as the other fonts here for those who don't use Windows. I only posted the link to a real font generation program in case you were interested in addressing the issues, but I guess not. -- Malvineous 22:46, 20 April 2010 (GMT)

I didn't realise someone had created a Keen 4 Menu font - no-one mentioned it when I asked around - so I ended up making my own. It's here if anyone wants it. Note that I added the two bullet-point styles from the menu screen (at 0xB7 and 0xD7 respectively) because I needed them for a project. On another note, maybe we should have a fonts page separately, since the menu fonts aren't related to SGA? -- DHeadshot (talk) 23:59, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Z

Just thought I'd say that Fightatmyplace had a point about the possibility the Z could be a Y with a dot. I'd never thought about it before, but the top bar is identical to the "dots" that make up the W. Obviously it would break with the theme of all dots being some distance from the nearest line, but it is a diagonal, so... Anyway, the point is that I don't think we should discount the theory. Malv, you reversed his edits, presumably because they hadn't been discussed first. So, Discuss: -- DHeadshot 16:19, 2 September 2010 (GMT)

That's correct - the article pages aren't the correct place to list everyone's own personal theory, however discussion is welcome. I must admit I only looked at the E and the R and saw that the dots were smaller (square) whereas the Z dot/bar is slightly longer (more rectangular.) Looking more closely I can see that this is the same length as the dot in the middle of the F, or the W as you say. Interestingly enough the dot in the middle of the J is also rectangular, but it is longer vertically rather than horizontally. Perhaps this should be treated as a short line, as distinct from a dot and a long line?

That debate section is getting a bit wordy though, before Fightatmyplace's point gets added back in, perhaps it would be better to replace it with something that's easier to read, such as a bullet list? -- Malvineous 21:58, 2 September 2010 (GMT)

I always thought that the J was 3 lines anyway! -- DHeadshot 17:55, 3 September 2010 (GMT)

I think the J, W and F are put that way to make all the letters the same average size, if you know what I mean... Dopefish Lives!^{[total rockingness unneeded]} Fightatmyplace 22:36, 8 September 2010 (GMT)