It seems Bethesda is having troubles with account recovery. Anywhoo...

The Futura Condensed font is a blasphemy against the Skyrim atmosphere! I managed to make it through the tutorial, but between the font and the UI I couldnt take anymore, so I decided to try and fix things. After familiarizing myself somewhat with flash files and editors, I ran into two walls of a sort. One of them is converting .swf to .ttf files. I can't. Indeed, the only program that I could find that can is a flash decompiler (Action Script Viewer) that is expensive, and I already own a flash decompiler. So, if anyone else loathes the turrible fonts they used and you have the ability to get me Skyrim's fonts in a font-y format that would be excellent. I can provide them in .swf format, if you dont want to deal with tearing apart the layers to get at them yourself.

The other wall is just general inability to actually change the files, but I'm hopeful once I have the fonts (so I can load fonts_en.fla properly) I'll be able to figure things out. So far I have managed to repack everything back up and get Skyrim to load, but my pokes at changing the fonts_en file to see what would change ingame results in all the text in the game being replaced by empty squares.

The difficulty I've run into doing this makes me suspect I'll find it impossible to actually edit the UI itself, but ahh well. I could struggle through with the better fonts, until someone skillful finishes things.

I haven't had time to do this myself yet, but I've looked through the font swfs myself. What you should need to do is edit the swf (probably after converting to a fla file) and add the new fonts in that you want. Make sure you set them to be embedded in the flash file, since I'm pretty sure that would be necessary (In Flash CS5 you select the text field, click on "Embed" in properties, give it a name, and select Basic Latin - that contains all the letters and numbers and stuff you should need hopefully). If you are getting squares instead of letters/numbers then you probably didn't embed.

Once you have done that you should be able to change the fontconfig.txt file to use the new fonts you have added (based on the embed name).

Keep in mind, this is all guesses. I haven't had time myself.

I did embed, did a random font for each one. Didnt change fontconfig though. The difference between fonts and texts in a .swf isnt quite clear to me at the moment. In the .fla, there was...well, I dunno. How it works wasn't readily apparent to me. I thought having the original fonts would help me sort of figure out how it works, because I could see what goes where (right now everything defaults to ariel, once I load it in CS5.5) But yeah, I'll go back and try things more specifically, and change around fontsconfig and other things, soon. I'll still need the original fonts eventually though, to keep the ones that I'm not changing, unless I want to wait for the CK so I dont have to edit the original Interfaces.bsa

Cheers

Edits: Looks like just changing fontconfig and making sure everything had a name in fonts_en wasnt all. Still squares everywhere. So, something else somewhere. Tiiired.

Personally I like the fonts, I'd just like them about half the size though.

Bah, the Magic Cards/Kingthings Petrock fonts used in Morrowind/Oblivion were blasphemies against readability. I've yet to see a "medieval" font that isn't hard to read, and I've likewise yet to see anyone present any examples for a medieval font working well with Skyrim's shiny UI to begin with.

http://www.fontriver.com/i/maps/celtic_hand_map.png !

But really, daily bump. I am once again awake and ready to bash my head against the wall some more trying to get Skyrim to use modified files.

Very Celtic, I'm sure, but it has no lowercase letters or special characters and isn't much less of a blasphemy to the atmosphere either.

Well, on one hand I finally got fonts to change. On the other hand I have no clue what I did. Maybe it was just using fonts that didnt have a full set of characters, I'm not sure? Doesnt seem terribly likely, as I tried 3 or 4 different basic pre-installed fonts. But anyways, hurrah. The downside is that all the special script (dragon, mage, daedric, and so on) is converted to regular characters until I get skyrim font files, so I suppose I'll have to pursue that more vigorously myself, seems this forum isn't chock full of flash professionals with lots of free time


[img]http://thetower.co.cc/Default.bmp[/img]
[img]http://thetower.co.cc/Centaur.bmp[/img]

No huge accomplishment I realize, but i feel successful. Took me the longest time to figure it out. Hopefully I've got flash files sorted a little bit, now.

I don't see how a celtic font isn't in keeping with Skyrims atmosphere (Bethesda included a couple themselves, they just chose not to use them for the main UI) but this is all a matter of preference, obviously. I don't claim Bethesda's fonts are the worst thing ever and everyone hates them...just that I hate them. I chose Centaur at random as a replacement, and I'm much happier with that. It's just so much less blocky.

As for reducing the fonts size, I assume you'd have to resize the UI elements themselves, not the fonts, which I cant manage at the moment, but I'll be looking into it once I find a way to get Skyrim's font files. I want to change the enemy health bar around, which would fall under the same category as far as figuring out how it works at least. ActionScript!

I much prefer the Centaur as well, personally.

Me too. It actually looks pretty nice. It's a shame, though, that all the unique fonts vanish at the same time...

Hey, I am nothing if not persistent. The unique fonts thing is only temporary. I'm remaking them by hand, or downloading versions that fans made for previous games, so I can compile everything back together and replace fonts as desired. If any font-gurus know of a (free) font that they think would be particularly awesome for Skyrim, feel free to tell me about it. Centaur was a completely random pick to see if I could get the fonts to swap, though I like it quite a bit too.