The built-in user interface of MESS provides a simple font to display its messages. It gets the job done, but it's hardly a piece of art… if you want something more stylish, you can replace it with your favourite font.

The font file is called ui.bdf and unfortunately you can't change the name because it's hard-coded into the program. The file can be placed anywhere on your hard disk: the fontpath option in mess.ini specifies its location.

The only remaining problem with the font file is its format - .bdf fonts aren't very widespread! Google can help you in finding something, but if there's nothing that fancies you the only solution is to convert an existing TrueType font to BDF (which incidentally means Bitmap Distribution Format: more info here).

Windows users can use a little tool called otf2bdf which despite its name works also with TrueType fonts.

*nix users probably already have on their disk the ttf2bdf tool: if not, refer to your favourite package tool to install it.

Once everything is in place, the command

otf2bdf -p 48 myfont.ttf -o ui.bdf

will create your font file. The ttf2bdf command has exactly the same syntax. If you prefer a different size for your font, simply replace 48 with the desired height.

Since MESS is Unicode compliant, it's advisable that you use a Unicode font: MESS supports many computers from Japan and Eastern Europe - it's increasingly likely that their input configuration menu will make use of kana or cyrillic characters… without a Unicode font you won't be able to navigate effectively the user interface.