Hi Kyence and the PSG translation team! Congrats to you Kyence and hope the team is still doing well!
Even though I am no programmer/coder, I would like to throw in my 25 cents.
I noticed that the character set appeared to be in tiles 20x20 pixels big. I did an edit to show the 20x20 tiles. It worked better than I thought
Now, the translation team already knows about all this, but it gives everyone else a glimpse as to how flush the letters would be next to each other. Also if you look closely at the letters the team added in, you'll see an extra color in the pixels that smooth the text edges, which eat up precious memory
However, if the team can actually implement variable-width for the text, adding in long names would no longer be a problem.
Let's take a look at Example A:
This shows the 6-letter versions of 2 character names: "Tyrone" for Odin, and "Alyssa" for Alis. As you can see, with a 2-pixel space between letters the full name can appear in the 4-tile limit with space to spare. The top "Alyssa" is centered, while the bottom "Alyssa" Is left-guided, with the capital A the same exact position as the capital A tile in the map.
What about item names, with a 9-tile limit? Onto example B:
This shows the two longest item names I could find in the PSG1 item list, with a 2 pixel space between each letter and the captial letters starting at the same point as the original tiles; as you can see, while the ultimate sword in the game has plenty of room to spare for spacing, the key name
just barely makes it in, and the key name is the longest item name in the game that I know of.
Maybe it can be spaced closer together. Well, let's look at example C:
Here, the only change from example B is that the letters are spaced 1 pixel away from each other. The capital letters from the key name did not change positions from example B either, but it looks much better simply because of the spacing
These are all reasons as to why we all should root for variable-width in the game. However, the size of the spacing should be considered well before it is implemented, as Example D will illustrate:
Both the small n and the small r have a 1 pixel space between them and the small a. Looking at it, it would seem that the a is too far away from the r, and someone might try to move it closer.