Tool for Converting FF7 PC Menu Textures?

[Chthon]

Is there a tool for converting the menu .tex files for FF7 PC to a readily-editable format, then back again? I've tried the following:

• TexTool -- produces png output with wrong colors.
• FF7 Tex Image Tool -- crashes
• img2tex -- crashes

(This issue seems to be limited to the menu textures. I tried TexTool to extract seffect1 and it seems to have worked perfectly.)

Some context:
My ultimate goal is to get a smooth font into Reunion R06+. I started out by plopping in the .png textures from Enhanced Stock UI, and quickly ran into two problems:

• The text in the dialogs looks like it was kerned by a madman. Probably because FF7 has no kerning functionality and the widths of the replacement font's glyphs aren't in proportion with the widths on the original glyphs.
  • The solution for this is obvious, if tedious: Extract and convert the original textures, vector trace them in fontforge, make up a .png using the traced glyphs. The problem is that I don't have a tool that can properly convert the original textures.
• It looks like Reunion R06 is ignoring the supplied .png textures in the \CUSTOM\ folder in favor of some .tex files in \BASE\New-Translation\. I'm guessing everything run through FF7's menu module is doing this.
  • It seems that the solution would be to convert Reunion's .tex files to see what changes were made, incorporate those changes into my .png files, then convert my .png files into .tex and replace Reunion's files. The problem, again, is that I don't have a tool for converting to .tex. (At least, if it can't get the conversion right the other way, I don't trust it to get this way right.)

 

[Chthon]

To partially answer my own question:

The problem with the conversion software is caused by the fact that these files have multiple palettes. So I need to find (or write) conversion software that can handle multi-palette .tex files. Can anyone point me to something?

I was wrong about Reunion R06 ignoring some .png textures. What's really going on is that the Enhanced Stock UI mod I was borrowing from doesn't have .png textures for the menu font because it uses hext files to make the menu use the field font. Unfortunately, that hext isn't fully compatible with Reunion R06, so I'm going to have to make new font textures. But at least it can be done with .png and I don't need to convert back to .tex.

Which is great because, as per this thread, it's not possible to upscale the font .tex files because sometimes the .exe grabs rectangles from them using fixed integer offsets and dimensions (rather than offsets and dimensions expressed as fractions of the texture dimensions).

 

[Fewtch]

Which hext in the Enhanced UI is it that forces it to use the field font? I'm working on something myself and foresee having to disable this.

https://github.com/niemasd/PyFF7

This can be used to convert nearly any texture, menu or otherwise to PNG (it's a bit iffy the other way around) but as you've said, you'll need something that supports multiple pallets to get what you're after. I've never found such a tool on here.