Faking Names Longer Than 5 Letters
This is one of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to EarthBound hacking. Unfortunately, despite a lot of attempts over the years, nobody's been able to create a hack that successfully loads and stores names longer than 5 letters. But there is a very common workaround that many hackers use with great success, accomplished by creating a new letter in the font that is visually a combination of two letters.
Consider, for example, the name Ninten. It's six letters long and can't be entered in EarthBound's naming screen! Well, lets make a brand new character in the font that combines two of the letters. We'll go with the i and n, since i is a small character which means our new character won't be very big. Follow the instructions on the main page about Fonts, and we should end up with:
Now we have a brand new character at the bottom there, in. That's not all we need to do though, cause we still need to add this character to the sheets for the other fonts as well. At the very least you'll need to add it to fonts 3 and 4, so that the name will show up right in inventory windows and in the HP/PP boxes. You only need to add it to the Mr. Saturn font or the Credits font if you intend for the name to be used with them.
There's a few more steps before we can use this custom character. Again, the main Fonts page describes these steps in more detail, but to summarize, you'll need to update the widths.yml files with the width of your new character, and then use the hex code corresponding to it in scripts. The first custom character is [B0], so to use the name Ninten now, you would type N[B0]ten into dont_care_names.yml.
The maximum length for a character is 16 pixels, so with 5 characters the longest you can make a name is 80 pixels, though in practice this will cause problems with spacing if the last character is the max 16, so you'll need to limit the last one to 15 thus limiting an actual name to 79 pixels. Within this, you can try and squeeze however many letters you want into it! Here's an example of an obnoxiously long name I made as a joke once:
Keep in mind though, that the length of letters in the HP/PP box font (TODO does this apply to the inventory font as well?) is hardcoded to 6 pixels, which will make it harder to cram letters into there. And of course, there will also be issues with the name looking weird in places not designed to hold such a long name (I edited the windows in that screenshot to be larger.)