Hi, I’m trying to translate FE6 in Italian, and I’m using the English translation as a base. The problem is that in the Italian language we use a lot of accented letters (à è é ò ù) that aren’t present in the English translation’s fonts. I went to the font table in FEBuilder and tried to create my own letters (basically re-creating the ones in the later GBA games with official translations), but whenever I add them in a dialogue and I try to play the game only two hearts appear to replace the letter and when I go back to the edit text option the accented letter is replaced by a normal one. (Eg: i write à > I test the game > the in-game à is replaced by two hearts > I go back to editing the text > the à is now a normal a)
You can just replace fonts. ^,<,>,$,_,{ and } are unused except for inside the linkarena to my knowledge. In case you don’t mind working with a non-modified fontsystem of course.
For the FE7 hack I replaced the font using Tile Layer Pro, but it was like 10 years ago and I barely remember how I did it.
FEBuilder is a more effective method to add new characters, but since I moved everything to buildfiles, now I use the narrow font method to add characters:
If you’re using FEBuilder, there’s a patch called “Draw UTF-8 Text”, it enables the UTF-8 unicode so you can write any character without replacing the existing ones.
I recommend against this. It will make your life more difficult in the long run.
This happens because the à in your text file is not encoded to bytes in the same way that the hack expects them to be encoded. If you put them in the same places that the FE8 (U) font puts them, for example, then the text encoding should be Latin-1. (If you use a Japanese ROM, the built-in encoding is Shift-JIS, but this encoding only handles plain English letters and their fullwidth variants - not accented ones. So in this case you would need to replace some characters and keep track yourself.)
Nowadays, text editors commonly give you UTF-8 (it’s the best overall compromise between the things a text encoding should do, and it’s a de facto standard for the web now), which is why you would want to use the patch @Mikey_Seregon mentioned. Or you can fix the encoding in your editor, if it’s supported.
If you put the characters in some custom place in the font, then you’re on your own. The important thing to remember here is that the ROM works at a low level: the textual data is bytes, not characters, and those bytes are used directly to look up glyphs in the font table.
(If there’s any part of the above which you don’t understand, it’s a good idea to learn. This reference is from 2003, but it still (AFAICT) holds up pretty well for the basics.)
I’m trying the same in French and I have the same problem. LPFan said it’s possible to just replace fonts. ^,<,>,$,_,{ and }. I took the characters é,à […] from the FE8(U) version and import them instead of the special characters. It’s working !
But I always have a horrible unwanted blank space after EVERY accented character.
Welcome! ^^ I am not very familiar with FE6 (nor much of FE Builder), but my guess is that the FE8 and the FE6 fonts are slightly different.
I think there’s more than one way to go about a solution, here’s my ideas:
(a) Port all of FE8’s font into FE6
(b) Create a copy of the unaccented FE6 vowels, add the accent to them manually, and set your new combined character to unused character indexes.
(c) My favorite idea would be to make a zero-width accent glyph by itself that’s high enough and centered enough to look good-enough on most vowels, and use that in tandem with your non-accented character in the text-file. I think the inelegant part of this is that the accents will show up briefly before the letter they’re combined with.
A bit of effort involved I think, but if you get stuck I can try to help.
If I use the idea b, it may have an impact on inventory and the locations.
The idea seems nice but we have a freeze when the game is reading something with too much size and it’ll be very problematic to know what thing is too big after this importation.
For the idea c, I have no idea I’d like to have the accentued letter “immediatly”. During the game, I think having a character that is displayed in two steps will be more annoying than a character that is slightly too small.
