Overview & Purpose

The Witcher 2's default user interface font is Bell Gothic, a typeface designed in the 1930s for the purpose of keeping small text legible even if printed on poor-quality paper, such as in phone directories. The font's design considerations make it suboptimal for screen media except for decorative purposes, and in the version used in the game, the characters are too thick and there is too much spacing in between them, which makes for an unpleasant reading experience. This is important as the game features a lot of reading material.

By comparison, the UI font appearing in The Witcher 3 is a modern flavor of DIN, optimized for on-screen legibility. The characters are thinner and tightly-spaced, making for less distraction with higher information density, which in turn means:

• Fewer long item names ending with an ellipsis (...)
• Subtitles blending in better with the background of the cutscenes
• Less scrolling needed to read journal entries
  

Perhaps to an extent it's a matter of preference but if you're coming to The Witcher 2 having played the sequel first, as was the case with me, changing the typeface improves the experience more than you would imagine.

Installation

Extract the contents of the downloaded files to the CookedPC subdirectory. Assuming the game is installed in %ProgramFiles%\The Witcher 2 the full path to the extracted files would be:

%ProgramFiles%\The Witcher 2\CookedPC\globals\gui\fonts.swf
%ProgramFiles%\The Witcher 2\CookedPC\globals\gui\fonts\bll55.otf
%ProgramFiles%\The Witcher 2\CookedPC\globals\gui\fonts\bll75.otf

This mod should not overwrite anything, since the original versions of these are stored in CookedPC\pack0.dzip. To uninstall, simply delete the files listed above. If however, for some reason you need the original versions of these files, for example for your own experimentation, you can also find them in the Downloads section.

Issues & Limitations

• The replacement font includes accented Latin characters so should work with other European language versions, however I only tested it in English. Non-Latin scripts (such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean) use different typefaces entirely and would not be affected by the mod.
• I did not resize the font in any way. I can confirm the original size works well on a large enough screen at 1920 × 1080 px. For playing on higher resolutions and/or smaller screens it might be worthwhile to also change the font size, if the game does not adjust it automatically (not sure if it does). Note that the same consideration applies to the original font as well, there is no font size setting exposed to the user anywhere as far as I'm aware of.
• DLC-type content, notably abetterui.zip, includes its own version of fonts.swf. While I did not observe any issues caused by this as the files placed directly in the CookedPC directory seem to take priority over any archive, it's possible that multiple versions of the file could interfere with each other. If the mod does not seem to work, this is the likely culprit.
  

How It Works

The game's user interface is rendered by Scaleform (Flash). The fonts used for this are embedded inside fonts.swf. Two variants are present: Bell Gothic and Bell Gothic Black. Separately, the same two fonts are also included with the game as OpenType files, named bll55.otf and bll75.otf respectively. These are stored inside pack0.dzip, the game's main data archive, inside the CookedPC directory.

In The Witcher 3, the fonts are embedded very much the same way in a customized Flash format file gameplay\gui_new\swf\witcher3\fonts_en.redswf inside the content bundle (%ProgramFiles%\The Witcher 3\content). There are three font variants, named: PF Din Text Cond Pro, PF Din Text Cond Pro Bold, and PF Din Text Cond Pro Italic.

• TW3 assets can be extracted with the Official Mod Kit 1.3 (wcc_lite.exe uncook -dumpswf) or using the WolvenKit 0.6.1 GUI (the last stable release to work with TW3, versions after 0.7.0.3 dropped support)
• JPEXS Decompiler can then be used to extract the fonts from TW3's fonts_en.redswf file as TTF and embed them into TW2's fonts.swf.
• Since only two fonts are used in TW2, the Italic variant from TW3 has to be left out.
• Casual testing shows changing the font embedded in the SWF file is enough for the new font to appear everywhere in the game. However, to cover all bases, I also replaced the two OTF files even though I can't say for sure what the game is using them for.
• The OTF files can be generated from the extracted TW3 TTF files with FontForge. Font names were changed from PF Din Text Cond Pro to Bell Gothic and from PF Din Text Cond Pro Bold to Bell Gothic Black respectively.
  

An alternate approach could be to modify the font names listed in one of the game's CSV files, which should work to the same effect, however since I can't be certain of it, renaming the fonts themselves to make them indistinguishable from the original ones for the game has the advantage of avoiding any potential corner cases.

Related Links

• Bigger Fonts is another mod that changes the default font in TW2.
• Font Change Resources & Instructions mod for TW3 has some more details about the process for those interested.
• Parachute Fonts are the original designers of the typeface: a downloadable PDF on their website has some details about the font.
• The Witcher 3 UI Font mod for The Witcher 1, also by yours truly.