How to avoid clipping of text in GS

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Peter Stauffenberg
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How to avoid clipping of text in GS

Post by Peter Stauffenberg »

When I see some AAR's I notice that players are using the substitute font called Impact. This font is a bit wider than then intended font Haettenschweiler. Haettenschweiler was selected as the main font for CeaW (vanilla game) and we haven't altered that.

Unfortuately Haettenschweiler is no longer automatically installed in Windows and MAC. Instead the font is installed if you have a Microsoft product like MS Office.

If you don't have MS Office then you can get nicer looking text if you install Haettenschweiler. E. g. you won't see the text in dialog boxes being clipped or long texts truncated with ....

You can download Haettenschweiler here:
http://www.fontpalace.com/font-download ... schweiler/

1. Open link
2. Click on Download Haettenschweiler Font (typed in green background)
3. Select Open
4. Select Install
5. Type Yes to overwrite if you already have the font installed

The above version supports all languages (including Russian)
BuddyGrant
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Re: How to avoid clipping of text in GS

Post by BuddyGrant »

A lot of text simulation games include fonts in the game install to ensure the game text always displays as intended regardless of the OS version. This is not as important as GS game changes of course but is this something that might be possible for GS? In one of my games I noticed fonts used that were not actually installed on my system, so that makes me think this is possible, though perhaps fairly complex to code. Any step to make the game look better immediately to new users without having to get them to do additional local updates on their own would be IMO an impressive part of a future GS upgrade. There are always some users that would either not bother or feel uncomfortable with extra manual install steps.

Side note: If this was not an impossible task you could also then consider some other unique fonts for the game if there was any interest in that. I'm thinking attempts at fonts that might look a bit more like the WW2 era.
Peter Stauffenberg
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Re: How to avoid clipping of text in GS

Post by Peter Stauffenberg »

The problem is that Haettenschweiler is shareware so you can download it for personal use. The problem is that Slitherine is a commercial company so when they make the installer it's considered commercial. They update vanilla CeaW with GS v2.1 and that's sold commercially. Therefore Slitherine can't provide the font.

It's probably the reason the font wasn't part of the vanilla CeaW even though it used Haettenschweiler.

So it's safer to let players download the font if they don't have it. The big question is whether we could have found another font that everybody has. We've looked into that, but not found a very condensed bold font. Arial narrow is not a bad font, but it's very thin. Even that font is a bit wider than Haettenschweiler. The substitute font Impact is bold, but a bit bigger so some text in dialog boxes are clipped.

We could have altered the game to support another font, but then we would have to redo font sizes many places to avoid clipping. That would have delayed release quite a bit. Still, we wouldn't be sure if the font would be available for all players. We need to support players with Windows XP, Vista and 7 and also different versions of MAC. It's hard to tell which fonts are common in all OS versions.
amcdonel
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Re: How to avoid clipping of text in GS

Post by amcdonel »

BTW - I have added this information to the GS 2.1 Manual.
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