To be honest, I have no clue what any of that means.
you don't have to read this wall of text if you're content with just playing the voiced vns (or you can check the images at the end of the post to decide if replacing fonts in renpy games would be worth it)
it's also only about games created using renpy, but the majority of non-japanese ones use it.
if you're using windows and have file extensions hidden (meaning you don't see a dot and a few letters after it in names of files),
You must be registered to see the links
a file ending with .exe is a windows executable (program launcher), a .txt is a text file, an .mp3 is an audio file, a .jpg and .png are types of image files, and so on. renpy can use ttf (truetype) and otf (opentype) font files to display text.
renpy comes bundled with a few (from a certain point including a version of opendyslexic font) but the devs can include different fonts in their games if they so desire (in which case they are likely to be found somewhere inside the \game folder of the game).
if the dev doesn't wish for users to mess with their game files, renpy offers an option to pack any custom files the dev adds to the game into .rpa files that you can't open normally and need something to extract them first (like extracting a .zip or .rar file but you need a special program for it). one of the programs that does it is
unren, or you can find more by googling for extracting rpa files.
chances are, if you're downloading compressed versions of games from here, the person who prepared them didn't bother packing the extracted files back into .rpa (they needed to extract them to compress the image/video files inside to reduce game's size, but the game will work the same whether the files are packed or not) and you'll find already-exrtracted files in the game folder.
replacing font files:
once you have found a ttf or otf file... (in the example image below i found TitanMedium.ttf and Gobold.otf inside game's game folder)
you rename the font file(s) to anything (you can delete them too but keeping them in case you need to restore them for some reason, is safer). to rename a file, select it and press F2 key (
You must be registered to see the links
).
then you copy an opendyslexic font file into the same folder (in the example i copy-pasted OpenDyslexic3-Regular from game's renpy\common folder).
and you change the name of the opendyslexic font file to what the font you want to replace originally had (in the example i changed it to TitanMedium.ttf)
and you repeat the copy opendyslexic file and change name steps for any more fonts you find (in the example i'm now doing it for the second font i found in that folder, Gobold.otf)
note that while renaming i also changed extension from
ttf to
otf; you may get asked if you're sure you want to change it because you can't actually change file type with renaming, but in this case we do it to let renpy find the file because in the game code it looks for "game\Gobold.
otf" and not "game\Gobold.
ttf" (windows needs the extension in the name to know which program to use to open a file, but files also have a bit of code stored in them that smarter programs, once you make them try to open the file, can use to identify the file type instead of going by what's in the file name).
if the game only uses default renpy fonts, they should all be in renpy\common folder.
if you don't find opendyslexic useful but know a different font that's easy to read for you, you can also look for a font file for that one and use that instead (for windows, all fonts you have installed on your computer should be in c:\windows\fonts folder).
replacing fonts might break stuff if the message box is densely packed with text and you use a more spaced out font (part of the text can go off-screen), though if the dev didn't disable dialogue history you could still view the missed text in there.
in-game examples before and after replacing fonts:
normal dialogue:
history:
