Skinable font

[tadatomix]

Title is that simple. I want to offer adding a new skinable, which can be applied to everything in the game. Reason why? As long as Torus isn't a bad font, it wouldn't fit to any of the existing (or upcoming) skins, I would like to see some other options as well.

How do I expect that to work? Fonts are already can be changed locally for the game, by generating a font atlas and putting it in the correct place (see https://github.com/ppy/osu-framework/wiki/Setting-Up-Fonts). My idea is to have quite the similar way, but for each skin. So, skin artist generates font atlases (possibly, easier will be call them either by the style (so, regular.png/.bin, bold.png/.bin, italic.png/.bin) or by just writing font to each style (so, font-regular.png/.bin, font-bold.png/.bin, font-italic.png/.bin)), then game just loads up this font and it's being presented everywhere in the game.

What if artist decides to add no font? Game should fallback to the local fonts it has. What if artist decides to use a font, which lacks unicode characters? This is already a case, happening with Torus and, like with it, I expect game falling back to the font, which has needed characters

[Gabixel]

Might also be fun to include a way to bring back customized keyboard typing sounds along with the font, i.e.:

osu.2025.10.09.-.15.12.04.01.mp4

[godlikeswan]

I also hate how similar o's and a's are

[Gabixel]

Yeaaah. I personally like the font and style, but at the same time I agree that it's hard to easily distinguish those characters, especially on lower font sizes.

Plus, I think there should be some accessibility settings for osu! in general as well. Some games have alternative fonts for people with dyslexia, for example. I'm no expert in accessibility, but I'm pretty sure the Torus font isn't really great for those people.
To pick a possible alternative, I came across the Source Sans font while searching a little bit about this topic in some games.

[tadatomix]

specifically for people with dyslexia, people use OpenDyslexia font (i've seen couple VNs (text-heavy type of games) using it), but I still think just a skinnable font would be the best so everyone could just use whatever font they want to

[peppy]

torus shouldn't be used in chat, to be honest.

[shiumano]

Support for TTF and OTF is missing, so it needs to be added.
ppy/osu-framework#6665

[tadatomix]

In case you didn't notice, my suggestion, doesn't require having TTF nor OTF. I don't expect support for them be anytime soon, hence why I thought atlases might be the best choice atm