User:Shaja

Plans changed, of course.

Regular OS or Photoshop-rendered grey-scale antialiasing just does not look good in Dwarf Fortress when the character cell background is inverted, since the characters have only a one-bit alpha mask.

I love Consolas, but it is totally not designed for non-Cleartype rendering.

The Microsoft Glass Gauge font from Flight Simulator was ok, but was composed of too many 45 degree angles for me to really like.

After a lengthy period of casting about for a fixed-pitch font that worked at the relatively high point size I wanted, I finally found Dimitar Zhekov's Terminus font, which looked almost right to me.

I also appropriated some characters faces that I think make nice not-quite-standard dwarves from The Boukagne's Font, by PRS.

So, after a lot of fiddling around in Photoshop on my PC, and Pixen on my Mac, I realized that neither PS nor Pixen worked very well for what I was doing. Good thing I found GraphicsGale, which is nearly perfect.

In the end, I hand-edited every alpha character used from Terminus, adding some slight antialiasing shading towards the upper end of the brightness scale - looks much better than no antialiasing with dark cell backgrounds, but still looks pretty good with inverted colors like the Dwarf Fortress frame title.

I also redid walls and some of the symbol characters, but there are still quite a few left from the base I used, 'Curses_24pt_cleartype_ThomModifications' (which was itself based on a set by Winterwing, which I've never seen).

And here is the result:

--Shaja 23:15, 27 March 2008 (EDT)

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9 March 2008

Hello, world.

I'm working on some 20x32 character sets - an antialiased set using Consolas, and an aliased set using Microsoft's Glass Gauge font, slightly tweaked.

Why 20x32? Because I use a 1600x1200 monitor, and none of the current fonts have quite what I like (although I am of course using other people's characters in many spots).