dachoutom

Eorzea (Extended)

Current version: 1.0 — View change log
Download: Eorzea Extended (*.ttf) | Eorzea (Original) (*.ttf)

Eorzea is the most basic of the fonts and wasn't made by me. It is an unofficial tracing of the actual font used by Square Enix to create the game's content (best I can find is claims it was done by a pair going by the names of Tristis and AaronDMorgan, but haven't verified that so I don't know 100% for sure who made it). Unforunately, they didn't include the Eorzean version of numerals or punctuation—somewhat understandable given how obscure they were to find and recognize in the v1.0 market wards and other Lodestone materials—and I don't personally like their choice of font for missing characters as I don't think they match stylistically. Bizarrely, they also screwed up at least one of the characters: lowercase L doesn't extend to the cap-height as it should, which makes it harder than it should be to distinguish i and l. I haven't done a thorough check over every single character for any other errors. While I do provide the original file as a mirror download, I have made edits to address the above shortfalls and added the most basic accents and ligatures into an 'Extended' version, available as a completely separate download above. The Extended version is used to display the sample below.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

Obviously several characters are missing or use Latin glyphs because they aren't included. Notable exclusions are the gil symbol, œ, þ, and ß because these would require contruction from scratch and not simple tracing (Æ is also messy for the same reason: I took a shortcut in simply mashing the existing A and E together instead of creating a truly unique glyph for it). However, because this font has the most basic forms of all the fonts it is the most utile with high legibility at all sizes. Sort of like what Eorzeans might use for print in their newspapers, which is why I sometimes jokingly refer to it as Times New Sil'dihn (Sil'dih being a dead Eorzean civilization, just as the Roman Republic/Empire is no longer around).

Eorzean Script

Current version: 2.4 — View change log
Download: Eorzean Script (*.otf) | Web Format (*.woff)

Eorzean Script is my first ever attempt at making any kind of font, let alone one for FFXIV. My main purpose was to acheive an informal 'handwritten' style to Eorzean text compared to the rigid, blocky original. I also wanted a font that included the numerals that Eorzea was missing. Going further, I wanted to extend the glyph set to incorporate international support not seen in the regular font, including not only accented characters like ö but also ones not often encountered in English such as ç, Ø, ß (German double-s, a ligature of long-s and either short-s or z depending on the typeface), the ligatures æ and œ, and international punctuation glyphs such as the inverted question mark (¿) and French and German style quotation marks. Even obscure crap like thorn (Þþ) and eth (Ðð) are in there! These extensions are my own unique interpretations of how Eorzeans would implement them and should be viewed as unofficial. Many words used in the game would properly use these ligatures but—as confirmed by the developers—for ease of programming have been separated into digraphs (compare Ætheryte vs. Aetheryte). The dollar symbol was changed to be the symbol for the Gil in FFXIV as well. I've also made some of these additions to the 'Extended' basic version above. Overall, I'm not terribly keen about the font even though I created it as I can see/feel its amateur-ness, and my insistence on using a calligraphic nib for lore reasons put the result somewhere between casual and formal with such bad penmanship that it just ends up ugly. But hey: it was my first font ever so I guess it deserves a little leeway and to stay around.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

The Script style maintains a fairly high legibility, though it is less than the plain Eorzea font. Because the script style is less blocky than the original, kerning between some characters can be an issue. I've included embedded kerning for the most common pairs but some may need individual adjustment. Many programs (including Microsoft Word) do not enable kerning by default so you may have to search the web on how to enable it for your specific program.

Eorzean Cursive

Current version: 2.4 — View change log
Download: Eorzean Cursive (*.otf) | Web Format (*.woff)

Eorzean Cursive is my second font and this time I went for sweeping, elegant style. After some discussion on the FFXIV Lodestone forums about whether it was possible to make a decent looking joined-up style of Eorzean writing, I took it upon myself to meet the challenge with this font as the end result. Obviously to make it work as a font I had to force all letters to link at a single unified height; it would probably come out slightly different if one were to actually write Eorzean Cursive by hand, with dependencies on adjacent characters. There's probably a way to do that in a font too, but it would be far above my skill level. I incorporated the same level of international glyph support that I provided in Eorzean Script, but for Eorzean Cursive I've omitted quite a few of the special characters that I didn't see as being of any practical use in a more formal style. Someday I might consider adding these in.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

The high degree of stylization comes at a tradeoff of terrible legibility at smaller sizes. Because the glyphs are joined up, kerning should be less of an issue for this font, though you may still occasionally need it where some upper-case characters are involved. For some reason it renders worse in Microsoft Word than any other program I've used the font in but it should still print out onto paper just fine (or saved to an image format), despite the on-screen appearance. The perfect choice for invitations to your Ceremony of Eternal Bonding!

Eorzean Elegant

Current version: 1.0 (orphaned) — View change log
Download: Eorzean Elegant (*.ttf)

Okay, so I lied above: Eorzean Elegant was actually my initial attempt at a fancy font, not Cursive. It was quickly superceded by Cursive because I thought Elegant ended up looking more curly-cutesy than actually elegant and refined. A lot of the upper-case characters were retained in the switch to Cursive (aside from slightly italicizing them in Cursive), so the two fonts are very similar at first glance.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

This font has pretty much the same pros and cons of Eorzean Cursive, since it was basically the prototype version. Because Cursive replaced it I no longer actively maintain this one and it is missing some of the characters like Πand probably a lot of the accented characters, however I provide it here as a legacy option. The two fonts have different names and identifiers, so they should be able to coexist peacefully on a single computer.

Eorzean Graphite

Current version: 1.2 — View change log
Download: Eorzean Graphite (*.otf) | Web Format (*.woff)

Eorzean Graphite is another attempt at making a casual/handwritten version of Eorzean. Previously with the Script font I had used a calligraphic pen nib setting in Illustrator which left the font retaining a bit of "refinement" still (if you want to call it that, given the pretty poor letter forms). Part of the motivation for that choice was by lore, where it seems quill pens are the standard in Eorzea. However, Amajina and Sons Mineral Concern has just recently uncovered deposits of a heretofore unknown material known as graphite. Originally thought rubbish due to its fragile nature, they soon found that the ease with which it flakes onto parchment is quite utile for writing and thus Eorzea discovered the pencil! Or so I tell myself at night. The result is this font, where I went for even more casual styling of rounder, simpler strokes with a bit of graininess to them and fewer-to-no serifs so that it looks like it was written with a pencil. Use with a grey color instead of full black for maximum effect! (Also works excellently as white on a darker background to replicate the look of chalk.)

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

Because of the graininess in the font each letter contains a LOT more shape data than my other fonts, so the file size of this one is a bit higher than the others. You may actually notice some delay before it renders when using it, depending on how pimped out your PC is. Enjoy!

Eorzean Fraktur

Current version: 1.2 — View change log
Download: Eorzean Fraktur (*.otf) | Web Format (*.woff)

Eorzean Fraktur is a second move towards the "fancier" side of styling. It is heavily based on the typeface seen in the Good King Moggle Mog and world map images in the section below, i.e. I more or less traced what letters were available and then improvised those that were missing. As such, much of the credit for this font deserves to go to the creative staff at Square Enix, and for the most part I only wrapped it up in a nice package for people to use. In contrast to some of my other original fonts, the clean lines of Fraktur help to make it quite legible even at small sizes.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx yzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

The only major caveat with Fraktur is that the capital O glyph is highly embellished with a long tail, so it can mess with line spacing a bit, but that shouldn't be too hard to adjust for either by simply moving the next line down, offsetting the O if possible, or just breaking the words around the tail as I've done in the sample above.

Eorzean Compact

Current version: 1.0 — View change log
Download: Eorzean Compact (*.otf) | Web Format (*.woff)

Inspired by the way I occasionally write our weekly dinner menu and shopping list for my wife's amusement, I decided to take that same tall, compact style with crisp neat lines and adapt it to Eorzean. It is in some ways similar to the common font Impact. A bit more of a modern flair to this one compared to the other fonts I've released, bringing Eorzea into the current age.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÆŒÐÞ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

With its simple form, there should be no major issues when using Compact.

Eorzean Uncial

Current version: 1.0 — View change log
Download: Eorzean Uncial (*.otf) | Web Format (*.woff)

I hinted at the potential of this font when interviewed by the Moogle Post fanzine, and it has finally come to fruition. I was inspired while watching The Lord of the Rings to make a very rustic font for Eorzean. Uncial is a type of insular script that was often used in old religious manuscripts and other scribework in the 4th–8th centuries, i.e. it's the perfect fit for your Fifth Astral Era copy of the Enchiridion. I've tried to reflect its real world roots with attempts at such things as a more insular-style G glyph. It can also evoke a somewhat Celtic feel.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzßæœçðþ
0123456789$ ! @ # % & ?
façade   Ætheryte   Rœgadyn   Tromsø   Gildengeheiß

Of immediate note is that—unique among my fonts—Uncial is a majuscule script, meaning it has no such thing as upper- or lowercase letters. If you absolutely wish to have something resembling lowercase or smallcaps, you will have to adjust the font size manually. Otherwise, this font should provide few other issues to work around.To be as historically accurate as possible, words should have minimal to no separation between them, though this obviously impacts legibility.

Other Eorzean Writing Examples

Although they are not fonts, those with an interest in Eorzean typography might like the following writing samples that can be seen in various FFXIV media SE have released, usually as promotional images for seasonal in-game events or supplemental lore articles on the Lodestone (i.e. The Mythril Eye, The Harbor Herald, or The Raven).

Some of the text on the game's world map:   JPG image (3000 x 1688)

A Fraktur style introducing Good King Moggle Mog XII:   PNG image (458 x 662)

A capital-C variant with signatures for the "Carriers of the Cauldron":   PNG image (590 x 441)

Order of the Twin Adder Poster:   PNG image (458 x 646)

In-game Fonts

Besides the actual Eorzean Font, many people wonder about what normal fonts are used in the game such as the chat log and parts of the UI so they can be used in fan-created artworks/projects. Unsurprisingly, they're pretty much all professional/premium fonts (i.e. not free). I'll try my best to also give out a close approximate from those commonly preinstalled with most operating systems that would be hard to tell the different at a glance but also won't break your wallet.

Huge shoutout to roxahris here, who positively ID'd these in the credits and data files and emailed me about it. I really only figured out the first one by myself.

Chat log, nameplates, etc. — Most of the UI, including but not limited to the listed items, is in a font called AXIS. You can read all about it in an interview with Naoki Yoshida about choosing the game's font. If you don't want to pony up the cash for the real deal (and for a cool $2,599, I don't blame you), Myriad or Meiryo should serve you well. Bear in mind some symbols in the game make use of the Unicode Private Use Area, so they won't exist or will look totally different in other fonts and maybe not even within the stock version of AXIS either. These are things like the gil or HQ item symbols that carry no meaning outside of the game (see this Reddit post and image).

Limit Break bar, HP/MP/TP, most other text written in caps — This one is called Miedinger ($69.95), but Eurostile/Eurostar Extended are close substitutes, or a modified Copperplate Gothic Light can work in a pinch as I've done on my commissions page progress bars.

Player names in some windows, "A Realm Reborn" and patch/zone title cards — Here we have a Roman Empire inspired font named Jupiter ($69.95). The player names appear to use a condensed variant of this one. Often a small diamond is used in place of the crossbar for capital A, which might be another variant of the font but is not visible in Canada Type's sample image: it may be an edit made by Square Enix themselves. Any Romanesque font with serifs that you happen to have preloaded on your computer should do fine here, perhaps with tweaking and set to small-caps. The best matches will have capital J's that only bend slightly at the bottom with a short descender rather than turning fully upright above the baseline, such as Trajan or Cambria but not Times New Roman.

Window titles, subtitles/captions, etc. — Trump Gothic Pro ($99.95) is the font used in these locations. Slightly condensed, sans-serif goodness! Free alternatives could include a condensed Calibri or Franklin Gothic, or even the font used on this very page: Droid Sans. A key feature to note is the uncommon combination of a double-story/looptail g variant while also being sans serif (usually you'll find them in serifed fonts).

Using the Fonts

Installing for Use on a PC/Mac

The fonts are provided in the OpenType format, and you can install them the same as you would any other font you can download off the internet. Once installed to your OS any program should have access to it, for example Microsoft Word or Photoshop. Easy.

All my fonts so far have been designed using vector methods in Illustrator, so they should scale up nicely to large sizes on screen or in print without losing any fidelity.

Applying Kerning

Kerning can be important on these fonts, and for some of them I've included it embedded in the font file itself. If you're unfamiliar with what kerning is, you can read about it on Wikipedia, but the gist of it is that it allows letter blocks to "overlap" slightly when the letters themselves have slants or overhangs. A strong example of this in my fonts involves upper-case F followed by lower-case letters (e.g. Fa, Fo, Fe, etc.). Without kerning there's a huge white-space that ends up between the letters, but with kerning they tuck in nicely close to the vertical stroke of the F, with the horizontal stroke acting like a little roof over their heads. Makes the font look a lot more natural and readable.

Although installing the fonts is easy, many programs don't enable kerning by default even if they can do it. Since MS Word and Photoshop are the most likely programs I foresee these fonts being used in, here are a couple links that explain how to enable kerning in them:

Kerning in Microsoft Word
Kerning in Photoshop

For other programs you'll have to look up how to do it yourself, but it should be a fairly similar process to these two. The embedded kerning may not always be perfect, so there will be cases where manual kerning might be preferred, which those links should also explain.

Using the Fonts on a Website

You can use the fonts on your own website, just like I have on this page, and it should be fairly straightforward if you're familiar with HTML/CSS. Browsers should also automatically use the embedded kerning as well to make it look nice and clean. With my latest revisions, I've also provided the alternate .woff format of my fonts which compresses the files for better bandwidth management. Those versions can be downloaded above in their respective sections by choosing "Web Format (*.woff)". Chrome in particular seems to handle the .otf files poorly and sometimes it either won't render or won't apply kerning or other undesired behavior, so I highly recommend using the .woff versions.

First thing's first... save the font file to your own location where your website can use it with your own bandwidth, don't hotlink like a jerk. Then just add the following line to your CSS file:

@font-face {font-family:'fontname'; src:local('fontname'), url('linktofont');}

Where fontname is obviously the name of the font you want to use (with spaces, e.g. 'Eorzean Script' or 'Eorzean Cursive') and linktofont is the URL of the location you saved the font file to. What this does is tell the browser to first load the font locally on the user's computer if they have it installed already, which will save you bandwidth. If they don't have it installed, then it will fall back on the link location so that the user still sees the custom font. You can also add more url() arguments at the end for additional fallbacks.

At this stage, you've only loaded the font file, but haven't actually told the browser to use it for any particular text. For that you need to add the font-family:'fontname'; property to whatever text element you want styled, either through an external stylesheet, internal stylesheet, or with inline CSS styling. For example, here's how you might apply it to a heading:

/* In a stylesheet: */
h1 {font-family:'fontname';}

<!-- Inline HTML/CSS: -->
<h1 style="font-family:'fontname';">Your text here</h1>

This isn't meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on HTML/CSS however, so if you're still confused about the above you really ought to go learn more HTML/CSS on your own before trying to implement this again. If you have administrative level controls to a forum, it should also be possible to create a custom BBcode tag that enables Eorzean text using the above HTML/CSS code, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm trying to do here and hopefully if you have that level of access you should already know what you're doing anyways.

Font Collaborations

As mentioned above at the top of the page, I would be happy to team up with others in creating even more font styles for Eorzean where you write/draw out the letters and I turn them into a usable font for you. At the most basic level, you'd need to fill out a template for a custom font such as this one. A Google Image Search for "font template" will also pull up many other similar examples.

Looking at the template, you'll notice there are tick marks on the side of each box. These are meant to help you be consistent in your writing, like the specially lined paper you probably used in early grade school when you were just learning how to write for the first time. Starting from the top going down to the bottom there are generally four main lines to keep in mind:

• Cap height/ascender: This is where the top edge of your capital letters should be, as well as things like the taller parts (the ascenders) in lowercase b and d. Strictly speaking these are two different things and they could be different, but in most cases they line up or very close to it.
• x-height/median: This is where the tops of your lowercase letters should be (i.e. the height from the baseline of a lowercase x, hence the name).
• Baseline: The bottoms of all your letters, both uppercase and lowercase.
• Descender: For letters like lowercase p and q that extend below the baseline, the part that pokes out is called the descender.

Staying in these lines isn't completely essential since I add the letters to the font one at a time and need to resize them anyways, I don't have a program automatically scan them all. However, you'll still get a more consistent look in terms of stroke width, etc. if you do your best to follow the guides. The templates also don't have every single character I need for a full font, and also have characters included that we don't need. This is particularly true of accented letters: you don't need to draw Á separately from A and the acute accent. The program builds the Á from the two components, which again helps in a consistent look. Of course, if you specifically want certain accented characters to look different, they can still be created separately. Semicolons and the like are also built from components (a period plus a comma), so those aren't needed. At some point I'll try to make my own version of the templates including only what I need, but until then, here is a fairly thorough character set I'd need typed out:

!#$%&()*+,-./0123456789<>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^`
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~¨°´¸×÷ÆæÐðÞþߌœˇ˘˛̑

Feel free to omit some of the more esoteric characters like thorn (Þþ) and eth (Ðð), or even add characters, but most importantly do as many diacritical/accent marks as possible (acute, grave, tilde, breve, caron, umlaut/diaresis, cedilla, ogonek, etc.) and do them seperately from any letters. I do encourage including as many of the strange letters as possible though, to expand Eorzean for use into as many international languages as possible. The letter ß for example is important in German, which has a fairly sizable FFXIV playerbase (I use a mix of capital S and lowercase z to form it, but since it's an unofficial addition, you could come up with your own way of making it as well). Remember the font won't just be for you after all! I'm happy to answer questions about any symbols you're unfamiliar with, since we can certainly continue exchanging messages through the whole font-making process.

You can fill out the template however you're able, by either printing it out and using a pen/pencil then scanning it back into the computer or by doing it completely digitally, for example in Photoshop. For the absolute best results and if you have the know-how to, you'd want to do it digitally using a program that allows you to make the letters as vector objects (e.g. Illustrator or the pen tool in Photoshop) so that the font can scale up to large sizes with no loss of quality. Scanned or raster images will start getting blurry the larger the font size. Digital methods also afford the luxury of the undo button if you mess up a letter.

Once you've filled in the template just send the file to me and I'll take it from there! Unless you say otherwise I'll assume you want normal spacing between the letters, but if you'd rather have the letters squished together (condensed) or spread out (expanded), let me know and I can make that happen.