Public Commander Keen Forum

naba · Meep Joined: 07 Mar 2011 Posts: 2

It's been bugging me for a while that no one's ever really traced those big SGA characters in episodes two and three and made a font out of it. (I didn't know about DHeadshot's effort until after I had mostly finished; still, mine's a bit different: most obviously, it uses curves instead of pixel-perfect blocky edges. There's a few other SGA fonts that look similar to this one, but of ones I've found, none really seem to try to adhere to the glyph shapes in episodes two/three.)

...So I made one myself. It's called SGA Vorticon Monospace. Download here.

Besides the font itself, the ZIP file contains a README and some other stuff. Users who wish to simply use the font (i.e. probably everybody) are encouraged to ignore and/or discard these things. Especially the README, which contains more documentation than any font should ever have.

Oh, and happy 3/14.

Update, 3/21:

I added digits. Because SGA doesn't seem to have any of its own, I made up some new digits that are kind of sort of based on the English text in episode three. It's still in the same spot. If you downloaded the earlier version, you may need to:

Clear your browser cache. If the old version is still in your cache, you might end up re-saving the old version when you go to download the new one.
(Windows) Manually uninstall the old version. In particular, loading the new version with the Windows Font Viewer will continue to show the old version while it's still installed.
(Unix-like systems only) Clear your fontconfig cache, otherwise the new digits may not show up, or they may only show up at certain sizes, or other fun things may happen.

LJH · Vortininja Joined: 19 Feb 2008 Posts: 247

It really needs some form of digits; whether you hunt down the SGA ones (I remember hearing somewhere that official ones exist even though they weren't used in-game?) or just use normal ones. Apart from that, this is neat!
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DHeadshot · Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 14:48 Post subject:

naba · Meep Joined: 07 Mar 2011 Posts: 2

I think I heard about SGA digits too, probably from somewhere on this board. I swear I looked, too, but I never found anything canonical, so I left them out. And it didn't feel right making up digits wholesale; after all, who's to say that SGA even has a set of ten digits? Maybe hexadecimal hit big in the Milky Way, and only us hicks here on Earth use base 10.

Still, I can think of at least two ways to address this:
1. Squash some SGA characters together to form digits, so that typing '1' on the keyboard puts "one" on the screen. This could be either as a string of full-sized glyphs, or by squishing multiple SGA glyphs into one character cell - like the CJK compatibility glyphs in Unicode.
2. Use regular old Hindu-Arabic numerals, maybe using the Latin text from the episode 3 chalkboards as guidance.

I'm kinda sorta leaning towards (2).

DHeadshot · Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 16:44 Post subject:

For the SGA Extended font (not game-accurate) that I've been working on on-and-off for years, I used the 7-seg numbers from the score HUD on Keen 4...
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Cereal Board!

tulip · Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 17:45 Post subject:

woo, keenday release from a new member! Very cool, and happy keenday!
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You crack me up little buddy!