How do people create all these menu replacement graphics?

I mean stuff like NEW GAME, LOAD GAME, etc. Do they just painstakingly create them one-by-one? Or is there a script that takes a font as an input and creates them all?

There's a program called "doomword" that let's you create graphics with words in doom-style font. It's what I use, at least.

Personally I use Doom Writer. I don't know how people make the completely new ones though that are in a totally new font. I suppose they make the font first and then manually assemble them. I had to do this for most of Doom 64 menu graphics.

I create a image of the font with a transparent background, such as this:

And then I copy and paste individual letters into replacement CWILV images.

Ye ye I know about these programs, but that's still quite a bit of work if you want to replace all the menu items and CWILVs and everything, right? Like a hundred graphic files at least. I thought maybe by now someone has a textfile with all of these words you just need to feed to Doom Writer. I guess not?

Personally what I do is create an image with all the letters and characters on it like Urthar did, then manually copy and paste each letter to form a menu title or map name and save it, rinse and repeat. It gets tiresome but it's the only way I know to do it with completely custom fonts. Doom Writer is good for standard Doom font.

I've used a number of techniques over the years.

• The manual way of taking font characters from a master sheet is tried and true, and I certainly would recommend it to anyone starting out. I used this sheet that I put together for the longest time for creating menu graphics and CWILVs using the Doom BigFont.
• BitmapFontWriter is a lifesaver when you want to do lots of text using the same font, which may include CWILVs, help screen text, and credit screens. I've put together a few fonts that I now use routinely with this program to ensure consistency.
• Most recently I have elected to simply print my desired graphics using a script in a GZDoom map and then taking an in-game screenshot (or a series thereof) to capture everything. I have also put together my own version of the Doom BigFont which uses uppercases glyphs from the menu, and a couple of slightly different punctuation glyphs, to ensure it's consistent with the default menu (it can be found here on Realm667). This is how I made the menu graphics for Joy of Mapping 4 & 5, and Project:Kate, all of which use unique text colors by Fuzzball but are otherwise identical to the standard Doom menu graphics.
  • It uses ACS to generate the graphics you want, and can do character maps for font previews, menu patches, and CWILVs, all in built-in scripts.
  • You'll need to know a bit about scripting to play with these, though. Simple line commenting is all that's required if you want to change what it actually prints.
• Gutawer, who's helped me with lots of Joy of Mapping-related scripts and features, kindly condensed my CWILV-generating script into a ZScript mod. This doesn't even require a placeholder map or custom binds to work, it's just a set of scripts that use simple bindings and print the level/author names straight to the screen for easy screencapping.
• For the record, I tried DoomWord once and didn't like how its results looked. The new colors are janky and the characters for the standard Doom fonts aren't consistent with each other.

Hopefully this post full of ramble and weird links helps a few folks.

okay you got me beat

1 hour ago, Jimmy said:

okay you got me beat

Wasn't aware it was a competition☺.

Still if anyone has you beat it would be @fraggle (who wrote textgen for freedoom).

Freedoom's textgen has one nice feature which is that it does kerning (adjusts the spacing between characters automatically so that they fit nicely together). For example, check out the word "SIMPLY" in RjY's image above - the L and Y should fit together but instead there's a big gap between them. The image below shows one of the Freedoom level titles. You can see that the 'T's fit over the 'A's instead of leaving a gap like that.

However, the kerning tables are all designed for Freedoom's font. The script can certainly be adjusted to work with the Doom font too (you can easily drop in a set of replacement characters) but someone would need to put in a bit of work to make a new kerning table for the Doom font. There is a useful unused function in the textgen source code that can be used to make a special kerning table test image when going through this process.

Fun fact: Strife Veteran Edition has a kerning table that's used at run-time for its big font, which I worked together on with ptoing.