Using Ath(Letter of Abh) fonts on PC

So far, there have been several Ath TTF sets, but the most official one is from Nine Lives, who created the animation. However, this font is under copyright and only distributed with Seikai on Monshou game CD; therefore, we do not use it here. Instead, there are several TTF sets that fans have created.

The font used to create this site is from CAT1's Lab. Unfortunately, the site seems to have been closed down. So, I'll explain with the font set from BarMark 2000.

Downloading Ath Ttuetype fonts

The reason I did not directly link to the font files is becasue the site maintainer wants visitors to read the terms of usage on the fonts. It might be an inconvenience to those who cannot read Japanese, but as much as I want to help the fans, I want to respect what the maintainer wants. The main points of what the terms say are: 1) Ath is owned by the writer of the novel, Mr. Morioka, 2) do not unpack and redistribute individual files in the archive, 3) no warranties are guaranteed, and 4) keep the font names when modifying. I suggested the maintainer to create an English page, but it seems not ready yet. Anyway, for that reason, I'll only "guide" those who don't read Japanese through the site.

First, click on BarMark 2000's Font Storage. When you get there, there is a link at the bottom of the page that will lead you into the doanload area. On the new page, there are 2 links to files tagged with "KB" labels. The only difference between the two is that the second one has one more set of fonts. Click to download the second one: i.e., the one with a name "ath_backup_barmark...". It is a self-extracting file with "EXE" extension.

Font installation

Do not forget to run your virus checking program on this first. Then, let's extract TTFs from the file. You could just run the EXE file, but depending on your system language, some of the files may not be extracted or the EXE file itself may not even run. The best way is to right-click on the file and manually open the contents as shown in the picture below. Use WinRAR or other similar archiving utilities for the job.

After opening the archived EXE file, extract only the TTF files as shown below. It doesn't matter where they are extracted, but for the next installation step, just remember where they are being stored. Files other than TTF sets may or may not be extractable due to language conflict.

Keeping open the directory where the TTFs are extracted, open Font window from the Control Panel. Then, drag the TTFs to the Font window to finish font installation.

Verifying installation

To verify if the fonts are correctly installed on your system, you need text editing software programs that support Truetype fonts, such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. You can select text font selection box in those applications and visually check if the new fonts are in the list.

If there was no problem so far, the Ath fonts installation was successful. By the way, ignore AthFontCentry and AthFontGothic in the above picture, since they are from other font files.

Typing Ath letters

You need a keymap before entering Ath letters. The next table shows the mapping between keys and Ath letters. Pay attention that an upper case key is different from a lower key. Digits are simple -- just use 0-9 keys.

Ath a i u é o e c s t l n h p f m ï ai y oe r ü au ÿ eu g z d b Keyboard A I U E o e K S T L N H p F M j J Y W R w O y P G Z D B

The fonts you have just installed are TTFs, meaning that you can apply the size and color changes and other visual manipulations to the fonts. The following pictures show examples.

Etc

Here I have explained how to use Ath on Windows. But, the same font sets can be installed on Linux or BSD that use X-Windows, so these fonts can be used in OpenOffice or Gimp in a similar way as shown above. I will explain how to install Ath fonts for X-Windows when I write an article for Ath metafonts for LaTeX.

Questions or suggestions are welcomed. Please leave a note on the board or send me an e-mail.

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