Chrono Trigger high contrast text hack

[LexDG]

Hello @LexDG ,

I see you made a hack to enhance Chrono Trigger DS font. I'm also making this to translate the game into my language. But I'm having issue with the font height because I need to increase the height (1 pixel more) to accommodate for larger characters in my language. But this makes the text in the message box to be pushed down and it doesn't look nice as the picture below:

Normal font size (10 pixels):
View attachment 514025

Increased font size (11 pixels)
View attachment 514026

So can you share with me how you can increase the font size and keep the text balanced in the message box? Is there a function in the game code that I can edit to display text in a proper position?

Pull the font file from mine and open it in SERFontEditor. You can base your font’s height on mine or the Japanese character heights. The key was to not go lower than the original.

I’d warn not to use my font directly though because it replaces some latin characters with squeezed western characters to fit in certain menu boxes. You can’t just type these out and if you confuse them it will lead to chaos.

Post automatically merged: Jul 3, 2025

Here’s mine in that same spot. You’ll notice the text is wrapped differently. Sadly, this isn’t always automatic and you’ll need to manually go through every piece of dialog to make sure you don’t go over four lines per box or else it will cut chop of text. You’ll need to put the code to press advance in some places and make ABSOLUTELY SURE there isn’t an accidental forced line break.

 

[hungdt]

Pull the font file from mine and open it in SERFontEditor. You can base your font’s height on mine or the Japanese character heights. The key was to not go lower than the original.

I’d warn not to use my font directly though because it replaces some latin characters with squeezed western characters to fit in certain menu boxes. You can’t just type these out and if you confuse them it will lead to chaos.

Post automatically merged: Jul 3, 2025

Here’s mine in that same spot. You’ll notice the text is wrapped differently. Sadly, this isn’t always automatic and you’ll need to manually go through every piece of dialog to make sure you don’t go over four lines per box or else it will cut chop of text. You’ll need to put the code to press advance in some places and make ABSOLUTELY SURE there isn’t an accidental forced line break.
View attachment 514458

Thank you for your reply.

I don't know how to use your hacks because I don't know how to open ups or bps files. And I don't use SERFontEditor because I find it quite small and inconvenient for me so I created my own editor.

I can see your trick now. You still keep the font height as 10 pixels but increase the height of each character from 5 pixels to 6 pixels. It's fine because English characters don't need to be more than 10 pixel height.

You can see here in my own font editor, I need to increase the font height to 11 pixels to accommodate for many characters in my language. I can't make these character if I still keep 10-pixel height.

For now, I'm OK with my font although it doesn't look quite nice on screen. I will try to look into Chrono Trigger DS code to see if I can change this text placement. Maybe I can't because I'm not familiar with assembly code.

 

[LexDG]

Ok that program would have saved me a LOT of trouble with previewing text length

What I would consider is maybe not letting any letters fall below the shelf. p q g j Q can be raised. How many character would end up going top to bottom?