Better in game font - Serifs are your friends!
By
AndyTheGeeky,
Posted on: 2007-01-06 02:45 in Player Guides
Excellent guide. Well written, as well.
Edit: Scratch my earlier suggestion. V Bold messes up some of the GUI
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it is possible for certain...unimaginative....people to mix I and l as needed to make it *look* like they have a certain name, when in fact they have another
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First of all, what's wrong with that?
Second, don't be so quick to assume that the only people taking advantage of the L and i trick are unimaginative. I think the Parallel Illusion on Triumph is a brilliant idea. If you don't know, all the members of the SG are Phantom Army decoys, once summoned by Illusion controllers, that have gained independence and semi-permanence. We all look exactly like the PA decoys, and we all have the same name, The Parallel Illusion. There are well over 50 of us.
Now, if you wanna be able to immediately tell the difference on your end, I have no problem with that. It's your game, too. But let's not just assume that this feature is always a bad thing.
@Quasadu
"We must prepare for DOOM and hope for FREEM." - SirFrederick
The following is a paid announcement by my illusion/bubble troller Elusive:
"Parallel Illusions rock! Phantom Army independence and equality now! /e picket"
...she's a little high strung. Please ignore her.
"and I wanna pony!"
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it is possible for certain...unimaginative....people to mix I and l as needed to make it *look* like they have a certain name, when in fact they have another
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First of all, what's wrong with that?
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It sometimes makes it difficult to invite someone to a group, for instance, if you don't know what letters are being used to make up someone's name.
Being technical, what is being added onto the letter I is arms not serifs. An "arm" is a thin stroke coming out of a letterform that is unattatched on one or two sides (like in capital "E"s and "T"s). The font being used on this forum, for instance, is a sans-serif but the "I"s have arms. OCR-B is a monospace sans-serif that has this feature as well.
All that asside, I really like this idea and this guide as well. The typography in COH is generally weak (the kerning on the zone loading screens drives me insane...), and this is a great tweak that makes the game just a little friendlier.
Thanks Kari! It's people like you that make this community great! 
Thanks for helping out with my suggestion. 
Like i said, verdana is kind ugly in-game. yoru best bet is to go with the second method since both the program and font out are available.
Im not saying *everyone* who does it is unimaginitive, there are exceptions, but, for the most part, its people who wont accept someone else had their idea first that cause the annoyance in the first place
this awesome.. cant wait to try it out
and hopefully the devs will like it, and not try to "fix" it >_>;
What I do in situations like that is I get them to send me a tell, then hit backspace to get their name. Replace the /t with /i, and get rid of the comma, and you're golden. Makes setting up PUGs less painful, since some people are atrocious spellers or have odd names.
Anyways, nice guide; didn't know you could do that.
I've followed the directions above and I can't get the ingame font to change, is there something else that might prevent it from changing?
which steps did you follow? the font replacement stuff or the font alteration stuff? Also make sure you got the name exactly right including the case. the filename ends with uppercase .TTF, not lower. and all the folders should have lower case names as well.
I followed the steps for the font replacement exactly, and I've tried deleting the font folder and doing it again a few times and it still doesn't work. :-/ Lowercase and Uppercase parts are correctly in there also. Not sure what's wrong.
thats odd. the fonts folder is inside the data folder right? and double check that the file name is mont_demibold.TTF. Im suprised that it isnt working...
when you change the name, don't put in the .TFF cause its already a .TFF file and the game doesn't reconize mont_demibold.TFF. But it reconizes mont_demibold if its a .TFF file
get it o_0
just rename it mont_demibold
on another note.. I think with the old font when some one would put in ^_^. The eyes looked kinda weird in the chat windows. But I changed the font to tahoma, and I can see the eyes perfectly 
cool, tahoma works good for you then?
also, i suppose if your using windows xp and the Hide Extensions for Known Files is enabled, then yah, it would be just mont_demibold. if Hide Extensions for Known Files is off, then you need to make sure you keep the extension.
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when you change the name, don't put in the .TFF cause its already a .TFF file and the game doesn't reconize mont_demibold.TFF. But it reconizes mont_demibold if its a .TFF file
get it o_0
just rename it mont_demibold
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This is ONLY if you cannot see File Extensions in Windows Explorer. Worst feature of windows ever.
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when you change the name, don't put in the .TFF cause its already a .TFF file and the game doesn't reconize mont_demibold.TFF. But it reconizes mont_demibold if its a .TFF file
get it o_0
just rename it mont_demibold
on another note.. I think with the old font when some one would put in ^_^. The eyes looked kinda weird in the chat windows. But I changed the font to tahoma, and I can see the eyes perfectly
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oi, that was it, thanks you guys. :-D
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when you change the name, don't put in the .TFF cause its already a .TFF file and the game doesn't reconize mont_demibold.TFF. But it reconizes mont_demibold if its a .TFF file
get it o_0
just rename it mont_demibold
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This is ONLY if you cannot see File Extensions in Windows Explorer. Worst feature of windows ever.
[/ QUOTE ]QFT
ZachsMind: Huh. I actually copypasted the font name that Kari gave, "mont_demibold.TTF", sans quotes, and it worked perfectly for me. Verdana isn't a suitable substitution though, and I'm too lazy to do the other thing. Think next time I have a chance I'm gonna try Tahoma.
Elusive: /e picket! My Phantom Army are actually spirits of dead heroes from Paragon's past and they are very peeved!
ZachsMind: Nobody really cares, Elaine.
Elusive: Little L's are people too!
ZachsMind: Stop it, yer embarrasin' me!
Elusive: Free PA Equality now! Parallel Illusion rocks!
ZachsMind: Shut up.
Elusive: Statesman's mother wore army boots!
Hey - thanks for posting this
I changed mine using Comic Sans MS - it looks great!
I highly recommend this font!
Mr E-Man ~ Mr E-Villain
XBL GamerTag: il Radd
I'm still trying to figure out why, but wingdings will crash your game. I'm thinking it has something to do with it lacking certain characters...but I could be way off.
On another note, I'd also recommend Comic Sans MS...it just has this comic book feel to it.
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What I do in situations like that is I get them to send me a tell, then hit backspace to get their name. Replace the /t with /i, and get rid of the comma, and you're golden. Makes setting up PUGs less painful, since some people are atrocious spellers or have odd names.
Anyways, nice guide; didn't know you could do that.
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Or if somebody tells you their name, you look for them on the /search screen, then click invite.
oh! i didn't think of that one, I love the comic font. I'm currently using Georgia and it looks nice, but I may try that.
Awesome. I'll do this when I get home from work.
RagManX
"if the market were religion Fulmens would be Moses and you'd be L. Ron Hubbard. " --Nethergoat to eryq2
The economy is not broken. The players are
At no time are any alterations made to client exe's or pigg's
Borrowed from Impkin's Sound Silencing Guide
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The first and most important thing to do is read this thread by CuppaJo:
A note on viewing pigg files.
Request to moderators: Please delete any posts that break the rules, not the entire thread.
Requests to readers: Please report any posts that break the rules.
Rule 1: Do not ask or explain how to view or change *.pigg files or any other CoH files.
Rule 2: Do not ask or explain how to view or change *.pigg files or any other CoH files.
Rule 3: Do not ask or explain how to obtain and use software for viewing or changing *.pigg files or any other CoH files.
Rule 4: Do not ask how or explain why this works. Questions and information of that nature might be considered "reverse engineering". Better safe than sorry.
Please comply with these rules. Doing so is what will allow this information to remain available in these forums.
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Since the built in font has identical lower case L's and upper case i's, it is possible for certain...unimaginative....people to mix I and l as needed to make it *look* like they have a certain name, when in fact they have another. Now there are two ways to fix this issue. The first and easiest one is to follow the Sound Silencing model and dump in a new font that will load in place of the old one. The font you choose is up to you, however for aesthetic reasons you should try and stay as close to the original as possible. For this example we will use a font with distinctly different I's and L's, the ever versatile tahoma, since everyone has this font (it comes with windows) its easy to do.
Go to your fonts folder, usualy C:\Windows\Fonts or C:\Winnt\Fonts and find the file "tahoma.TTF". Select the font then go to the Edit menu and hit Copy.
Now go to your game folder, such as C:\Program Files\City of Heroes. In here, go into the folder "data". if you dont have that folder, make it now. Go into that folder and then create a new folder called "fonts" (without the quotes). Right-Click on that folder and hit Paste.
Now go into the folder fonts you just made and right click on "tahoma.TTF" and hit rename. Change the name to "mont_demibold.TTF", sans quotes.
Now when you launch the game, the default interface font will be replaced with the font tahoma, making it much easier to tell those letters apart. Note that this only applies to the GUI. If you have a suggestion for a better font, let me know!.
The text over character heads will not change, thats a bold version of the same font and thus has a different name.
I realise this is a lot of work for such a small thing, but its one of those Quality of Life issues that the devs would *never* get to because they have a bazillion other things to do.
Now, if your feeling adventurous, there is another, superior way to deal with this issue. Rather than replacing one font with another, you can edit the font used in the game with a program like HighLogic Font Creator, which is available as a 30 day fully functional trial. Just open the original font Montreal DemiBold (Available Here[my googlefu is strong!]), mont_demibold.TTF, find the capital letter I, and add bars to the top and bottom, and merge the contours together. I wont go into a whole thing on how to do all that, since its pretty easy to figure out, just make sure you read through the built-in help a bit to get familiar with the programs workings. once you have changed the letter I in the font, save it and dump it in the same location as above.
I have also created an Example Image with window scaling at 150% so you can see how things look for me now. I hope this guide helps you out with this small QoL issue.