I just started translating some of the strings of the game in Greek. However, the result (see the photo) is damn ugly . The letters are way bigger the are supposed to be. Any ideas? (I saved the file in UTF-8.)

The letters might be bigger - but is it really a problem? If you're going to translate the whole thing, then all of the other writing would be made bigger accordingly, so it wouldn't look out of place.

...Of course, it would be a problem where the text barely fits in its current font. I don't know much about the different file and font encodings, so sorry if this sounds patronising, but have you tried reducing the size of the font? I know Notepad can handle both font sizes and UTF-8...

Changing the font size was the first thing I changed, but to no avail.

Actually, it does... "Continue" is smaller than "Single player" and the greek translation ("monos paiktis") is still bigger. So, yes it is a problem

Actually, I translated the whole column and it seems a bit weird... In the fourth line from the top Omega is totally squeezed (it's not supposed to be like this, see the photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega)

However, if there's no easy solution, I bet it doesn't matter that much

Unfortunately, the LCARS font does not include any Greek characters other than capital omega, small mu and small pi (hence the "squeezed" omega in your screenshot). The same goes for the other two compressed fonts I have. I'll have to provide a way to override the default fonts.

Can't you just edit the font file and add in the characters that are needed? I've never made a font file before, but i've heard of people using editors to make their own fonts. There has to be some way that they make fonts afterall. If Supremacy had a font file that contained all the characters people need for their languages (Ok, maybe not Chinese ), then there wouldn't be a need for an override.

Then again, an override might be useful to people who want to mod the game in future...

They are special editors like FontForge etc. I had tried it once, but I never managed to make it work quite right. Back then I didn't have Linux so I used Cygwin... which is a "Windows assimilated" version of Linux command tools (not an enviroment really).

Yes, it is possible to edit the font and add in missing characters, but somebody has to design those glyphs. It's not that straightforward--you need to provide hinting to ensure that they render properly at lower point sizes. It's quite a bit of work, and I have no experience in that area.

Actually, I just managed to have Fontforge up and running. I agree that creating fonts is tedious, but editing them, eg stretching say Omega, is veeeery easy with this program . So Mike, which is the font used that I should edit? (there's a whole bunch of them in \Resources\Fonts)

Helvetica Ultra Compressed is the LCARS font. But the problem is that it's missing nearly all of the Greek characters, so you would need to create new glyphs for them.

If it's missing nearly all of the Greek characters (besides Omega mu etc), then how did I write in Greek? Or perhaps in case some of the characters aren't there, it uses another font for them?

If a character is missing from a font, then it use the character the default font in its place. That's why the omega in your screenshot is very narrow while the rest of the characters are wide--the omega is the only greek character supported by the narrow LCARS font--the rest were being displayed in the default system font, which is much wider.

I edited the LCARS font with fontforge making Omega wider. Now it looks much better and I am happy!
If you want the modified font I can upload it.

Cheers

Unfortunately, there's a greater problem: the wider font will either screw up the layout of the main screens or cause text to be clipped. The LCARS interface was designed for a very narrow font.

Only Omega is now wider, the others are the same. I didn't see any problems in the menus of the game... (like screwed up layout of the main screens or clipped text). As soon as I havetranslated some more text I'll upload some photos

Hmmm, a closer examination revealed that indeed these problems do occur...
Any solutions?

The only solution is to find a compressed font that includes a full set of Greek glyphs, or to add Greek glyphs to the current LCARS font.