Super Famicom Classic Mini font question
- Thread starter spotanjo3
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I don't know how many here are familiar enough with Japanese fonts to even get you close here (some of the terms and family names are a bit different*, even before you get to things like imperial seal script). Have you tried the OCR programs/services for font identification? https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ is probably the best known but there are others.
If you need the text to compare the would be fonts against
スターフォックス２
Other than the 2 that is all katakana so be wary of what the rest of the font contains -- much like western fonts get bored with punctuation I have seen a few Japanese fonts get lazy with certain aspects of their character sets.
Such services also work better with plain black and white text so might as well have a version of that in black and white.
*a basic starter image that might help here if you can't find the font and just want some starting terms. Courtesy of https://gbatemp.net/threads/densetsus-translation-toolbox.311523/#post-3936639
If you need the text to compare the would be fonts against
スターフォックス２
Other than the 2 that is all katakana so be wary of what the rest of the font contains -- much like western fonts get bored with punctuation I have seen a few Japanese fonts get lazy with certain aspects of their character sets.
Such services also work better with plain black and white text so might as well have a version of that in black and white.
*a basic starter image that might help here if you can't find the font and just want some starting terms. Courtesy of https://gbatemp.net/threads/densetsus-translation-toolbox.311523/#post-3936639
The problem is that this font is still black, not in the background. The dark grey is fine.. I am looking for this font to be white so I can use it accurately for Japanese SNES Classic Launcher for Switch. I like to collected Japanese and Europe SNES Classic Launcher for Switch. Japan version is the one I need for font to be white.
Sorry to bother you, by the way.
Sorry to bother you, by the way.
Last edited by spotanjo3,
I am lost here. What are you trying to do?
You talk about fonts being colours when they are not -- even bitmap fonts on old consoles are arbitrary colours decided by the game at run time. Modern fonts (no idea if the SNES mini uses modern approaches or more old school ones) are just maths to describe the characters so they can be scaled to any size, and colour is then completely arbitrary and nothing to do with the font..
You talk about fonts being colours when they are not -- even bitmap fonts on old consoles are arbitrary colours decided by the game at run time. Modern fonts (no idea if the SNES mini uses modern approaches or more old school ones) are just maths to describe the characters so they can be scaled to any size, and colour is then completely arbitrary and nothing to do with the font..
Okay.. Do you see Japanese text ? Its white letter ? That's what I am looking for. I already have dark grey bar. What I have is black Japanese text font. Hope you understands me. Sorry.
Fonts don't generally contain colour information. They just contain pictures of shapes or mathematical descriptions of said shapes. It is up to whatever program that uses them to assign a colour to them. Sometimes programs will use the font directly, other times it will be rendered as an image first and then the resulting image displayed by the program (embedded/lower powered devices often do this, especially with fancier graphics like a text box with a border).
If you ask someone "What is this font called ? " they will look at the font, figure out what class it is in (in this case it is probably a gothic family font) see the shapes it does that might be unique to it (the first stroke in タ/ta being in line with the start of the second stroke being fairly unique -- most things タ has a... in English that would be an ascender but I don't know if Japanese orthography calls it something different) and try to figure out if they have seen that font in particular before -- I am not much of a graphical designer and my machine has about a thousand fonts installed so it tends to come down to someone having seen it before, or maybe someone being nice and sticking that into a font render (in my case GIMP has a nice feature called render font map which allows me to make an image with a line of text for every font on my machine, or a selection thereof) and seeing if they can match the unique aspects of the font in question. In my case I neither know my Japanese fonts nor have that many installed.
If you ask someone "What is this font called ? " they will look at the font, figure out what class it is in (in this case it is probably a gothic family font) see the shapes it does that might be unique to it (the first stroke in タ/ta being in line with the start of the second stroke being fairly unique -- most things タ has a... in English that would be an ascender but I don't know if Japanese orthography calls it something different) and try to figure out if they have seen that font in particular before -- I am not much of a graphical designer and my machine has about a thousand fonts installed so it tends to come down to someone having seen it before, or maybe someone being nice and sticking that into a font render (in my case GIMP has a nice feature called render font map which allows me to make an image with a line of text for every font on my machine, or a selection thereof) and seeing if they can match the unique aspects of the font in question. In my case I neither know my Japanese fonts nor have that many installed.
I will try again if you want.
Fonts these days are mostly just equations to describe the position of lines relative to each other. This way they can be scaled basically infinitely. There are older approaches where they are small pictures but we can skip that one for now.
Saying white font is more likely to get someone to look at a page of text or something and select the font within it that is white. As there is just one text section in the image that gets a bit confusing here but that is OK. Once again fonts are just maths to describe a series of lines. There is no colour involved in that, other than maybe if it has a bit of shading to fade out or look like a fancy old style character but that is still a thing the maths can describe. Any colours that it takes are either in an image (think JPG) or selected by the system when it is running.
So now we want to find out a mystery font from a picture. Assuming we don't recognise it because we use it every day ( https://www.lifehack.org/428846/top-20-most-popular-fonts-of-all-time ) or for a special project then we have to do some detective work. There are probably hundreds of thousands of fonts out there though, and as we are dealing with Japanese (not a language most around here use extensively) then it gets even harder. We will also assume we can't ask the makers of it, or go on their website to see if they are using it for something there (modern web design has some nice options here, and website editing tools also help).
If the text is reasonably clear, reasonably large and otherwise clean from other things that might trick it then we can try OCR (optical character recognition). Most people use it more to scan in documents and have them become editable text but it works for this as well. https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ is a good service that will do this, however there are others out there. It helps if it is black and white, with nothing else in the background so I made that image above to help with that.
If that fails (my browser was playing up so I don't know if it worked) then time to move on to the next stage.
If you know what your font families are then we can start to go further. For Roman character set fonts then the primary distinctions are serif and sans serif, however Japanese has a bunch of different ones (the big image above covering the main families in Japanese). In this case it is probably a font in the Gothic family.
After this you can narrow it down by further styles -- the tags on something like https://www.fontsquirrel.com/ doing well for this, though it is more of an Roman character font site rather than a Japanese one so we would need to find a Japanese one to play properly here. They will usually allow you to enter some of your own text though so you can try comparing there.
Comparing is not something most people can do by looking at a whole line of text and then an example line, especially if they use slightly different character spacing, different colours or something. This is what I was on about with unique parts of the font though. While serif and sans serif cover the basic differences between fonts... it gets far far harder and all the little lines, loops, curves and flourishes have names https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/anatomy
I don't know the Japanese equivalents for those names but the principle still works.
The idea then is you find something that is fairly unique to the font you want to identify. In this case the character タ (called ta) in that image does not have a little bit above the horizontal line, though if we are talking about how you write it in Japanese then the left curve is written first (the order you write things in Japanese is sometimes just as important, if not more, than the resulting character being recognisable. This concept is known as stroke order, as in strokes of your paintbrush.) and the horizontal line part comes later.
Assuming we did not figure out what it was using OCR or by narrowing it down with a font tool then we get to go more in depth. I like the image editor called GIMP. It has a nice feature that allows you to take a line of text and render a massive image using every font on your machine, or a selection of them. I use it mostly for seeing what text a client wants for images I am making them but it works here too.
Here now we have noted that unique thing with the little bit not being above the horizontal line like in most writings of タ you would render one of those images using that line ( スターフォックス２ ). You would now scroll down looking at every single タ in it. If it has no little bit above the line then you would note it and carry on, or compare the other parts of the example phrase to see if they match too.
Hopefully you then find the one you are looking for, or one that will do. Often you find one you like even more.
It is a tedious process but it is what is done when the other things fail and nobody knows what it is.
Edit. None of the fonts on my system have the missing upper bit, and Nintendo's page for Star Fox 2 also still has it. However I am seeing the same thing in print Failed to fetch tweet https://twitter.com/Fujio_Asakaze/status/947735390340857857 so I don't think it is just a normal font that was chopped off at the top, though I am not entirely sure what that book is.
Fonts these days are mostly just equations to describe the position of lines relative to each other. This way they can be scaled basically infinitely. There are older approaches where they are small pictures but we can skip that one for now.
Saying white font is more likely to get someone to look at a page of text or something and select the font within it that is white. As there is just one text section in the image that gets a bit confusing here but that is OK. Once again fonts are just maths to describe a series of lines. There is no colour involved in that, other than maybe if it has a bit of shading to fade out or look like a fancy old style character but that is still a thing the maths can describe. Any colours that it takes are either in an image (think JPG) or selected by the system when it is running.
So now we want to find out a mystery font from a picture. Assuming we don't recognise it because we use it every day ( https://www.lifehack.org/428846/top-20-most-popular-fonts-of-all-time ) or for a special project then we have to do some detective work. There are probably hundreds of thousands of fonts out there though, and as we are dealing with Japanese (not a language most around here use extensively) then it gets even harder. We will also assume we can't ask the makers of it, or go on their website to see if they are using it for something there (modern web design has some nice options here, and website editing tools also help).
If the text is reasonably clear, reasonably large and otherwise clean from other things that might trick it then we can try OCR (optical character recognition). Most people use it more to scan in documents and have them become editable text but it works for this as well. https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ is a good service that will do this, however there are others out there. It helps if it is black and white, with nothing else in the background so I made that image above to help with that.
If that fails (my browser was playing up so I don't know if it worked) then time to move on to the next stage.
If you know what your font families are then we can start to go further. For Roman character set fonts then the primary distinctions are serif and sans serif, however Japanese has a bunch of different ones (the big image above covering the main families in Japanese). In this case it is probably a font in the Gothic family.
After this you can narrow it down by further styles -- the tags on something like https://www.fontsquirrel.com/ doing well for this, though it is more of an Roman character font site rather than a Japanese one so we would need to find a Japanese one to play properly here. They will usually allow you to enter some of your own text though so you can try comparing there.
Comparing is not something most people can do by looking at a whole line of text and then an example line, especially if they use slightly different character spacing, different colours or something. This is what I was on about with unique parts of the font though. While serif and sans serif cover the basic differences between fonts... it gets far far harder and all the little lines, loops, curves and flourishes have names https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/anatomy
I don't know the Japanese equivalents for those names but the principle still works.
The idea then is you find something that is fairly unique to the font you want to identify. In this case the character タ (called ta) in that image does not have a little bit above the horizontal line, though if we are talking about how you write it in Japanese then the left curve is written first (the order you write things in Japanese is sometimes just as important, if not more, than the resulting character being recognisable. This concept is known as stroke order, as in strokes of your paintbrush.) and the horizontal line part comes later.
Assuming we did not figure out what it was using OCR or by narrowing it down with a font tool then we get to go more in depth. I like the image editor called GIMP. It has a nice feature that allows you to take a line of text and render a massive image using every font on your machine, or a selection of them. I use it mostly for seeing what text a client wants for images I am making them but it works here too.
Here now we have noted that unique thing with the little bit not being above the horizontal line like in most writings of タ you would render one of those images using that line ( スターフォックス２ ). You would now scroll down looking at every single タ in it. If it has no little bit above the line then you would note it and carry on, or compare the other parts of the example phrase to see if they match too.
Hopefully you then find the one you are looking for, or one that will do. Often you find one you like even more.
It is a tedious process but it is what is done when the other things fail and nobody knows what it is.
Edit. None of the fonts on my system have the missing upper bit, and Nintendo's page for Star Fox 2 also still has it. However I am seeing the same thing in print Failed to fetch tweet https://twitter.com/Fujio_Asakaze/status/947735390340857857 so I don't think it is just a normal font that was chopped off at the top, though I am not entirely sure what that book is.
Font identification can be tricky, especially with Japanese typefaces and variations in script styles. Tools like OCR can definitely help. I also found tulisan keren aesthetic useful for exploring creative typography ideas.
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