Hello. I decided to translate monster hunter portable 3rd into Russian. I was able to unzip the files and change the text, but in the end I saw that there was too much distance between the symbols. Replacing pgf fonts changes the font, but does not change the distance. Tell me how to fix this.
Hacking Intersymbol distance Monster Hunter Portable 3rd
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I don't know if anybody has delved into the font handling of this game such that they could give you an answer, much less them being on this site (we happily hack PSP game and host discussions but compared to the likes of the GBA, DS, 3ds and so forth there are far fewer knocking around).
Still character placement is usually handled by either the game's code or the font format itself (some massive table usually at the start or end of the font, but I have seen it character by character) where it details width and height, and in some more advanced cases then also line height (for English/Roman characters think yjgpq) and that might also be happening here.
Alternatively that might be a fixed width game -- normally I would expect to see characters like i, l possibly j and maybe f squashed up against other characters (like you might well be reading this here). In which case you would probably have to add it yourself (which is going to involve code unless the devs had it but did not use it, which is rare). Mind you the Cyrillic letters there are very different spacing -- when you say replaced how did you do it? If you took a file from another game using the same format which does have Cyrillic support or a premade font some other hacker made then I would have to wonder if the font itself has some measure of spacing support. In that case you are back to figuring out where in the font the spacing is made, or overwriting the Roman characters in the original font with Cyrillic (or adding the extras of whatever vintage Cyrillic you care about has over what the Roman one provides).
Still character placement is usually handled by either the game's code or the font format itself (some massive table usually at the start or end of the font, but I have seen it character by character) where it details width and height, and in some more advanced cases then also line height (for English/Roman characters think yjgpq) and that might also be happening here.
Alternatively that might be a fixed width game -- normally I would expect to see characters like i, l possibly j and maybe f squashed up against other characters (like you might well be reading this here). In which case you would probably have to add it yourself (which is going to involve code unless the devs had it but did not use it, which is rare). Mind you the Cyrillic letters there are very different spacing -- when you say replaced how did you do it? If you took a file from another game using the same format which does have Cyrillic support or a premade font some other hacker made then I would have to wonder if the font itself has some measure of spacing support. In that case you are back to figuring out where in the font the spacing is made, or overwriting the Roman characters in the original font with Cyrillic (or adding the extras of whatever vintage Cyrillic you care about has over what the Roman one provides).
I used mhtools-master to unzip data.bin, changed the text files of the game and put it back into the iso. The Russian font began to appear without adding it to the game, I think that it uses pgf console fonts. I tried to edit them. Found that the font is changing, but the intersymbol distance remains the same.
If the Cyrillic letters appeared without editing the game it sounds like it has them already in there. If it is as different to the rest of the text as that image you posted would appear to indicate then I would suspect somewhere in the font file there is a width value. Alternatively find the font and edit the Roman characters to display Cyrillic instead if they are all fairly acceptable widths in the Roman section.
The easiest would be if you opened up the game and it had a nice file/folder called font (or fnt or chars or some other term that means much the same thing), or a known font extension or something like that. Second to this is elimination -- if another file is known to be something else then don't look to find a font in it.
As you might not be so lucky the next thing would be to find it in RAM/video memory and dump that. Search the ROM for that. Obviously any post processing or compression (not all fonts are compressed but it can gain something so some will be) that was done in the ROM/ISO will trouble that, not to mention if it is a font with that many characters then games don't tend to stick it all in RAM and just grab what it needs (though a fragment might still find you the file in question).
Corruption is a method you can use. If you tweak a file and something changed in the game then you know your tweak caused that. It is somewhat unfashionable these days, and can take quite a while to find what you want if you are unlucky, but I will still mention it.
After this you head into assembly and debugging territory. https://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/ is for an older emulator of the GBA (rather than the command line style thing it uses we tend to suggest the graphical no$gba these days) but it is much the same for any system really. Find where it lands in memory, then go back and see what put it there, might be straight from the ROM but might have another step in between so rinse and repeat until you end up with the data being copied from the ROM. For the PSP this might be a bit harder as the emulators for it are not that nice just yet (though it has been more than a year since I properly looked at PPSSPP and they were looking at adding some debug options worth having), and hardware debugging is good for making cheats but not too much more.
As you might not be so lucky the next thing would be to find it in RAM/video memory and dump that. Search the ROM for that. Obviously any post processing or compression (not all fonts are compressed but it can gain something so some will be) that was done in the ROM/ISO will trouble that, not to mention if it is a font with that many characters then games don't tend to stick it all in RAM and just grab what it needs (though a fragment might still find you the file in question).
Corruption is a method you can use. If you tweak a file and something changed in the game then you know your tweak caused that. It is somewhat unfashionable these days, and can take quite a while to find what you want if you are unlucky, but I will still mention it.
After this you head into assembly and debugging territory. https://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/ is for an older emulator of the GBA (rather than the command line style thing it uses we tend to suggest the graphical no$gba these days) but it is much the same for any system really. Find where it lands in memory, then go back and see what put it there, might be straight from the ROM but might have another step in between so rinse and repeat until you end up with the data being copied from the ROM. For the PSP this might be a bit harder as the emulators for it are not that nice just yet (though it has been more than a year since I properly looked at PPSSPP and they were looking at adding some debug options worth having), and hardware debugging is good for making cheats but not too much more.
If they translated the game and messed with the font themselves you might be able to compare the original Japanese font to the translated one and get some idea of how it works. Bonus is most translations only change the text and font, and whatever graphics need tweaking as part of that. If you know the text then you should be able to find the font quite easily there.
I don't know what we are a suggesting for tools to compare directories of files and look for changes these days but there should be plenty out there.
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