This tool allows you to convert plain text into whatever format is required for the various fan-made runic fonts in the Ultima games.


Encoding Ultima
4		 Ultima
5		 ASCII 2
cases		 Incl.
non-runics
Micro Dragon's
Britannian Runes
Britannian Runes - Other
Ultima IV
Ultima V

Micro Dragon's

Designed for the font that Micro Dragon included with his Win95 theme. It does not convert to runic Unicode, but to extended ASCII characters, making all conversions to Latin. Blends/diphthongs are represented by A's with accents on them, and all other letters appear as 7-bit ASCII. This means the encoding is useful only for this font.

Micro also did us the extra favour of populating most of the extended ASCII code set, including punctuation and numbers, none of which are runic, by the way.

Britiannian Runes

It does not convert to runic Unicode, but to extended ASCII characters, making all conversions to Latin. All normal letters occupy the lower case code points. Blends/diphthongs are represented by upper case ASCII characters and some extended ASCII. This means the encoding is useful only for this font.

No numbers or punctuation.

Britiannian Runes - Other

It does not convert to runic Unicode, but to extended ASCII characters, making all conversions to Latin. Both cases represented. Blends/diphthongs are represented by extended ASCII.

Numbers and plenty of punctuation are included.

Fonts

Micro Dragon's font, as provided by his Ultima Theme for Windows 95. It is based on the Ultima V font.

Britiannian Runes. Has the bare minimum of characters in a single case and a period. It is based on the Ultima V font. Credit goes to "Norwick".

Britiannian Runes I. It is based on the Ultima V font and reportedly "appear on wooden signs". Much richer than the Britiannian Runes, but other characters are not supported here.

Britiannian Runes II. It is based on the Ultima V font. and reportedly "appear on metal plaques". Much richer than the Britiannian Runes, but other characters are not supported here.

Britiannian Runes II - Sans Serif. It is based on the Britiannian Runes II font, but without the serifs which never made sense for runes anyway.

Ultima IV Authentic This is an authentic version of the runes appearing on the Ultima IV reference card and applicable to all games until Ultima IV. In designing the glyphs, few assumptions were made about the intended appearance, and there were no attempts at improving the appearance, beyond the rendering in the manual.

Ultima IV Polished This a polished version of the Ultima IV authentic font. Glyph heights have been equalized, corners have been sharpened and many of the control points removed. Impossible to notice a difference at a regular size.

Ultima V Authentic This is an authentic font appearing in the Ultima V Book of Lore and applicable to all games thereafter. In designing the glyphs, few assumptions were made about the intended appearance, and there were no attempts at improving the appearance, beyond the rendering in the manual.

Ultima V Polished This a polished version of the Ultima V authentic font. Glyph heights have been equalized, corners have been sharpened and many of the control points removed. Impossible to notice a difference at a regular size.

Some of the fonts used in this utility are mirrored from the Game Font Database.

README

This tool is designed to facilitate the generation of text using runes found in the Ultima games. Unfortunately, most/all Unicode runes are not usually rendered by fonts that approximate Ultima runes very well, and some aren't even close. Therefore special fonts are required. What's more, the runes that appear in the hard material released with the games tend to differ from those used in-game! As this project develops, (some of) these fonts will be made available.

Input

All of your text should be ASCII, although it will safely pass Unicode characters through. This tool does not collate Latin letters, so anything that isn't 7-bit ASCII won't be translated.

Runes in Unicode

Ultima runes are largely gleaned from J.R.R. Tolkien's works ("cirth"). Those are based on ancient Germanic runes ("futhark"). Currently, there is a petition to include Tolkien's runes in Unicode, but no one is even considering including Ultima runes in Unicode... yet. Consequently, the Germanic runes used by this tool will look very different from what is seen in Ultima games when using general fonts and other code points won't even look like runes.

Project

Think you can do better? Here are the font project files. They were built using FontForge.

TODO