Making Swedish, Norwegian, Danish & Finnish Fonts | Rebuilding Heroes of Might & Magic [Episode 122]

After getting an email from a volunteer offering to clean up a Swedish translation, I set out to add Nordic language support to the Heroes of Might and Magic 1 engine rebuild. The real obstacle was never the translation itself — with 1,260 language keys, machine translation is the easy part. The hard part is fonts. In this episode I walk through the font manufacturing process for Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish. The original game shipped fonts for French, German, Russian, and Polish buried inside the Heroes AGG file (which is also how I fingerprint the different international editions), but there was never a Scandinavian release to pull from. So I show how I reused the German glyphs I already had — the ä and ö came essentially for free — and generated the missing characters like å, æ, and ø from scratch using AI, adjusting them pixel by pixel across both the small and large fonts until they looked right. Along the way I get into the quirks that make this fun: why Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish share sounds but spell them differently, how the written forms overlap, the Finnish alphabet's relationship to Swedish, and a detour through a few centuries of Nordic history and geography. I finish by reading some of the translated in-game text out loud to sanity-check the results, then send the font off to my Swedish volunteer for review. The outcome: four new supported languages. The buttons are still English-only for now — that's a separate problem for another day. Also covered: how this same pipeline (build the font, machine translate, native-speaker review) could open the door to languages like Vietnamese down the road. Lots of commentary and bad pronunciation in many languages.