Release of the CUF (font & text rendering) mod tool

[Tellos Athenaios]

Another update, another changelog. This one brings:

• Added a dialog to compile Strings files from XML.
• Added a dialog to preview Strings files, and added another to preview CUF files.
• When compiling Strings files can specify an XSLT stylesheet to generate the actual compiled XML from a different XML format. People who want to simplify their XML code and know a bit of XSLT will appreciate the possibilities. (For those who do not know what XSLT is: w3schools.com has an excellent introduction to it.)
• When compiling Strings files you can specify character encodings to use when the (XML) data is read & fed to the compiler. This is useful for people who insist on not using UTF-8, especially when you must work with UTF-16LE encoded files. (Notepad calls that Unicode.)
• Fix for num entries field in strings.bin files generated.
• Fix editControlCharacters() method in FontToolkit to work properly with fonts that have been run through compact() in FontToolkit first.
• Improved exit handling means that fork'ed shells will run properly if you attempt to exit the program before they have started yet.
• Misc fixes to show 1-based indices instead of 0-based ones in GUI labels and the like.
• Compile with debug info by default.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Updated the tool again, this time it contains the following changes:

Improved support for Windows:

1. Build scripts use native2ascii which means compiling the tool from source is considerably easier.
2. Tool forces the use of UTF-8 encoding internally, which fixes some visual glitches on Windows.
3. Added a Windows Script Host launch script, written in JScript. This means that unless Windows Script Host has been explicitly disabled or something similar, you can use that script on Windows the same way you can use the POSIX sh script with a sh interpreter.

Other changes:

1. Added filtering of output for some progress messages: turning the “ChattyShell” preference to off (false), and the number of progress messages will be considerably reduced for large fonts.\
2. Improved character encoding handling when compiling Strings files: due to some internal changes you can now leave encoding fields blank and let underlying parsers “guess” or (“detect”) the right character encoding in use. One particular benefit of this is that byte order marks are now mostly harmless in XML documents if you do not specify a character encoding yourself (previously you could get a content not allowed in prolog message or similar).
3. Added dialogs to the CUF shell GUI to run scripts.
4. Added support for wrapping multiple URI-resolvers in a single one, which is useful in conjunction with a KeyResolver.
5. Added support for compiling M2TW-style tagged files. Note that it is not at all as robust as compiling from XML files. In StringsToolkit, use the compile() method which takes input file name, output file name, a KeyResolver and a boolean flag to use this feature.
6. Added IdentityMapping (a kind of StringMapping) which allows you to compile without macros (Macro files): it simply passes its input text on to the other layers of the compiler.

[Mataputas]

I'm really interested in your project. Should it work for Rome Total War engine?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Depends on whether the version of Rome Total War you have contains CUF files (with .cuf extension).

Mine (plain old vanilla) doesn't, but maybe one of the extensions (BI or Alexander) does?

You can check whether they will work (if you have them) by trying to preview them. If that appears to work OK (you get a nice preview rendered in the given font), it means that your CUF files from RTW are structured the same way as those from M2TW and that in turn means you can use the program to create your own replacement fonts.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Pushed out a minor update which improves upon the tool in several small ways:

In FontToolkit (org.europabarbarorum.cuf.shell.FontToolkit):

• Added fixChartableCompatibilityFor() methods. These can be used to make a font with re-mapped character tables (e.g.: a font treated with compact() or map() or editControlCharacters()) conform to how M2TW treats the CUF files: you select a subportion of the complex font which is to be presented in a compatible fashion (in the example given you might select plain glyphs) so that text which is not properly localised (is not part of the strings.bin files) . This can be used to fix the display of e.g. unit stats (format strings) in such a font as well as unlocalised text (text which is hardcoded in the M2TW executable, e.g.: the “- ” before author names in quotes).
• Preserved generic type signatures. This is unlikely to break any scripts relying on FontToolkit. It does not change behaviour of these methods.

Changed TopLevelSource (org.europabarbarorum.cuf.font.TopLevelSource) to be merely a complementary interface to CUFSource (org.europabarbarorum.cuf.font.CUFSource). In the unlikely event you were using it to inherit the contract for CUFSource methods in addition to its own interface contract, this will break your script. But the good news is:

I made various CUFSource implementations (MappedSource, RestrictedSource, AbstractCUFSource, and MixedSource) more generic. Hence if you were/are/will-be using a custom implementation of CUFSource you should now find these a lot easier to work with.

[Tellos Athenaios]

New update:

Fix: missing format specifier for nested namespaces. So if you made that error you now get the proper error message.
New: font previews/GUI now use a more understandable notation for decimal values & editing works.
New: marker lines which you can use to judge the effect of layout offset settings on GUI.

[nedensiz1]

Hi, I have a problem about M2TW Fonts:

Three monts ago I and some of my friends decided to translate M2TW into Turkish. We created a translation group in our web site and started to work on it. We translated some of M2TW files and we have made some progress. But we encountered some problems while translating. We can't use some letters like "Ğ", "ğ", "İ", "Ş", "ş" (which placed in our Turkish alphabet) in some of the text files.

For example: I tried to change Iconium city name in "imperial_campaign_regions_and_settlement_names.txt" file:


Result: I can't see city name on the top


Is there any way to use these letters, add them into M2TW fonts, change some fonts, maybe change font style or something like that?

I tried to edit some fonts on my computer with TypeTool program but it didn't work.

Codes:


We will be happy If you can help us, thanks.