Fonts

[Kawa]

Am I the only one who thinks phrases like "that one typewriter font you get with Windows" are too vague to be much good? This may sound like a stupid question, but you know people exist that can't call Courier by name... or did I mean Courier New? Imagine talking about SCI font resources. You'd think "0.fon" is always the thick one, but it's not; Conquests of the Longbow, Quest for Glory 1 VGA, and Space Quest 4 have a thin squarish font, Police Quest 3 has the smaller common font (usually 3 or 4) as its 0, and Space Quest 1 has a stylish thin serif. So you can't just refer to 0.fon and always be understood as meaning the thick one. (Did you know that the 0.fon in LSL3 is the same as always, but with an LSL3 logo added?)

But if you say "Times New Roman", you know the type.

I'd like to humbly suggest giving these various SCI fonts proper family names for discussion in the community. For example, the five most common fonts could be Sierra System, Serif, Sans, Small, and Debug. Fonts that appear mostly if not exclusively in Space Quest could be Wilco -- SQ4 60 and 61 could be Wilco Serif and Wilco Serif Outline.

Thus, most SCI games have Sierra System, but some replace it with Sierra Square, or even Sierra Small.

[OmerMor]

Great initiative!

We should probably use the international versions of the games for a more complete character sets.
Other than the ones you mentioned here, there are many more. Maybe the wiki would be a better place to start a more comprehensive list? (Just noticed the wiki is down ATM)

[OmerMor]

Related note to troflip:
SCI Companion previews only a part of the font's character set. SV on the other hand shows the entire character set.
I know you can open the font for editing in SCI Companion and see all the characters, but for easier browsing, can you please show the complete fonts?

[MusicallyInspired]

Awesome idea! I'm a big proponent of using Sierra Small for all message boxes, incidentally. There's also the giant font that came with Brian's SCI0 template game. Sierra Large? Though, I'm not even sure if it was in a Sierra game. It might be a conversion he did. (this image is double sized)

[Kawa]

I don't think it is. If anything, this font is in various Sierra games, usually as #7, and more deserves the name.

And now, research!

Code: [Select]

SIERRA SYSTEM
-------------
Regular:
Colonel's Bequest
EcoQuest I, II
Freddy Pharkas
Gabriel Knight
Codename: Iceman
King's Quest I, IV, V, VI
Laura Bow
Larry 5
Police Quest I
Police Quest Open Season
Quest for Glory 1 EGA
Quest for Glory 2
Quest for Glory 3
Space Quest 5
The Seasoned Professional

Larry 1 VGA:
All glyphs but 0x00 NULL have padding on the right instead of the left.
0x09 TAB is blank, like an actual spacer.
0x1C is a double quotation mark.
0x7F has dithered square.

Larry 2:
0x2C COMMA is one pixel wider.

Larry 3:
0x1C is an LSL3 monogram.

Larry 6:
0x00 NULL is a little wider.
0x09 TAB is blank, like an actual spacer.
0x7E TILDE is blank.

Pepper's Adventures in Time:
All glyphs but 0x00 NULL have padding on the right instead of the left.
Line height is increased.
Widths for many characters from 0x02 ALT through 0x3E GREATER THAN are changed.
0x2D HYPHEN-MINUS is shortened.
0x05 TRADEMARK, 0x3C LESS THAN, and 0x3E GREATER THAN are reshaped.

Police Quest II:
0x00 NULL is a black square.
0x03 CTRL is redrawn
0x06 is a roman numeral II.
0x07 is a bullet dot.
0x0A is an inverted bullet circle.
0x18 and 0x19 are redrawn thinner.
Widths for many characters from 0x0B MALE through 0x31 DIGIT ONE are changed.
0x58 CAPITAL LETTER X is wider.
0x5C BACKSLASH is wider.
0x61 LOWERCASE LETTER A is wider.
0x7C VERTICAL BAR is wider.
0x7F is a little house.

Quest for Glory IV:
0x09 TAB is blank, like an actual spacer.

Space Quest III:
0x0B MALE and 0x0C FEMALE are variations of the roman number III.
Widths for many characters from 0x0B MALE through 0x31 DIGIT ONE are changed.
0x58 CAPITAL LETTER X is wider.
0x5C BACKSLASH and 0x5D CLOSING BRACKET are wider.
0x7C VERTICAL BAR is wider.


[OmerMor]

Here's a humble start:
http://sciwiki.sierrahelp.com//index.php?title=Fonts

I'll add more later - but all of you can join the party... :-)

[Kawa]

Sorry 'bout that edit, modify quote button's right next to edit modify D:

Anyway, login required.

[Collector]

I have been starting to add entries about the SCI entries to the Wiki,  but most are just stub articles at this point. This fits in with that effort, so I added this to the SCI resources category.

[Collector]

Sorry to dredge up such an old topic, but I stumbled on this and decided to add all of the fonts to the Wiki page. I would like to note which game each font was taken from and add a zip of each font that the user could just drop in their game. I know it has been a long time, but does anyone remember where they got each on from?

http://wiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=SCI_Fonts

Also, what was the reference for the names given each font?

[Kawa]

Also, what was the reference for the names given each font?

I came up with those names so I'll answer: Heir Today Gone Tomorrow, Roger Wilco... and if you look in my stash you'll see a "Locksley" too, as in Robin Hood.

(Note that the preview on the wiki for Wilco Serif is wrong.)

Oh also all of them are of course ready to download from the stash: https://helmet.kafuka.org/sci/fonts/