Fonts

So we at MangaGamer have noticed that our users seem to be disappointed with our current font selection, and we are considering making a change to remedy that.

While we did consider programming an option which would allow users to select their own font, we had to decline this option due to the nature of these games. With many of the fonts users would be able to select on a standard Western version of Windows, there is an issue where the character width and spacing causes lines to exceed the display space provided by the text box or the screen. This would result in parts of words or sometimes whole words being omitted because they wind up being displayed outside of the display area available in these games.

This means that if we are to change the way our games work with fonts, will have to change which font we use. As it stands, there are several limitations to our range of selection. First of all, the fonts must be able to work with the text boxes and display space available to our games. This means that fonts with large widths must be ruled out. Secondly, we have to make sure that it is free for our company to make use of the fonts. This limits us to the fonts that fonts that come pre-installed on all Windows machines. However, there is an exception. As we have noticed, Fontspace has several fonts which are free for corporate use.

So, with these limitations in mind, we have compiled a poll for our users to voice their opinions. You can find the poll here at the MangaGamer forum. We will run let the poll run for about two weeks, after which time we will review the results. If there is a clear majority of users who favor one font, it is highly likely that you will see a new font being used for our future releases.

Update: Here’s another sample of the fonts against a lighter background.

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29 Comments

  1. Clearly Wingdings is superior!

  2. Out of the current options I prefer Arial, but how about Consolas? It’s the one that fans use to replace MangaGamer’s normal fonts with, and it actually works quite well with visual novels.

    • I’ll ask about that one actually. It wasn’t on the original list, so I thought it might be a commercial font, but perhaps …someone… is still working on Windows XP and simply didn’t have it available to test.

      • It probably is commercial.
        The basic Microsoft ones are pretty much the only ones that are completely free for everyone to use. It’s much simpler to just use one of those than to run the risk of someone, multiple years down the line coming and claiming a font you’ve been using for 2-3 years now is actually theirs and then paying the royalties or just paying for the litigation. Since finding the original owner of a font and then negotiating a contract can be hard, it’s best to play it safe.

    • They actually sell the Consolas font so it might be difficult to support all the XP users…

      http://www.ascendercorp.com/catalog/microsoft/clear-type-font-collection/

  3. Glad to see you guys are paying attention to the users. Each step taken to improve your releases helps to cut down on unauthorized patches and the like.
    Now if you’d do something about people stealing your games….

  4. Trebuchet is a good font too.
    Easy to read and, with the same size, she’s take less place than Aria (for exemple) and comme with all the windows.

  5. The examples above are not really representative of the problem as even ‘courier new’ looks OK with this opaque background. The problems begin if you have a transparent text box and a light background. You should not conduct the poll with the above example. See http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/1329/badfontexample.png for a more problematic scenario.

    • In this case it’s more a letter edge and shadow setting problem than a font problem.
      Some game have setting for that.

      • Sorry cgland, we are not talking about some games but about the BGI games of MangaGamer and these don’t have a setting for outlining or shadow generation of their font. So for all intents and purposes it is a font problem.

        • It’s not because D.C. don’t have those setting that the other Eroge translated by MangaGamer don’t have it ^^

          So, like i said some Eroge have those setting some don’t have.

      • It’s not really a shadow problem as there’s a shadow in that image already; if there weren’t, it would be nearly impossible to read the text, especially the part over Kotori’s shirt. If you made the font thicker and keep it white and with the current shadow settings, it would be a lot better and still be legible over Kotori’s shirt.

  6. I’m glad this problem is being looking into. I myself have looked for font replacement patches in the past for MG games. The problem I have with the current font is it’s too light. Anything that’s bolder than the current font would fix that problem.

  7. Arial black works best, imho, but ms sans fits too.

  8. Mangagamer’s novels has just a option to select a font for texts as me and yours like,commonly like as in HinataBokko ^^

  9. MS Sans Serif would be my pick.

    Its the best option between something simple like Arial and something more elegant like Times New Roman ; and its easy to read.

  10. I like Arial, it looks clean and legible. I’m not a fan of the typewriter style fonts.
    I’d also like bigger fonts.

  11. Remember, don’t forget to head over to the forum and cast your vote.

  12. This is great news guys! Will you release updated versions of the older games when you implement these changes?

  13. Personally, I’d prefer seeing a font-select option appear in future MangaGamer titles. That way, if a particular user can’t use a font for whatever reason (ie: astigmatism), they can just swap it with another already on their system. I had a bit of trouble enjoying Melty Blood & Melty Blood Re-ACT because of Mirror Moon’s choice of font – I had to strain my eyes to read the minuscule text in many cases.

    If a font-select option isn’t possible, I’d recommend something along the lines of MS Gothic. It’s a free font and it’s very easy to read (if memory serves, NNL used it in Wind -a breath of heart-). It’s one of the default fonts when Japanese-language support is enabled, and I’m sure Microsoft wouldn’t object to it being publicly available (especially since it’s freely downloadable on their site).

  14. MS Sans Serif is the best.

  15. >Font-selection Option

    Please take time to at least read the oringal post. ^^;

    There was no problem in doing this in Japanese because the text length is pretty much consistent in any fonts.

  16. Speaking as an application designer and programmer, I don’t think the reason stated in the original post is an adequate justification for rejecting such a useful feature. Now, if selecting a wide font on an English system was enough to bring Windows to its knees, I might be more inclined to agree with it. As it stands, though, it feels more like an excuse from someone who doesn’t want to implement a “divide” button on a calculator because they’re afraid one of the users will try to divide by zero. I’m willing to bet that the user would notice if the text overran the textbox boundary and would select a different font immediately, making the reason stated a moot point.

    I’ve seen a couple of VNs that allow the user to specify the font as well as the font’s size, making the boundary overrun issue even less of a problem. Some titles implement on-the-fly word-wrapping so that even variable-width fonts aren’t an issue. With all due respect, I don’t think that MangaGamer has properly appraised the possible solutions to this problem.

  17. Courier New Bold looks nice

  18. I have to say courier new

  19. I’d go with Courier New, with the bold version being second. Somehow, monospace/courier just looks RIGHT for visual novels.

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