Hi folks! Making a bit of a comeback to broodwar after 5 years, working on a remaster for an old map. Been doing some lurking, and several topics have been very helpful, but I can't find anything for this. The only thing outside EUD's that I've yet to master in map editing is text stacking, however; it appears all the current formulas are outdated or incorrect, maybe due to a recent patch or something.(Older maps with stacked text, such as BunnykillBound2, which you can get from the map archive bounding.net for reference, no longer have stacked text, for example)

So, I'm just trying to see if there is anybody on here with experience stacking text, recently, who could maybe give me some pointers or a formula. I've been trying to do it in ScmDraft2 following the formulas on this page:
https://staredit-network.fandom.com/wiki/String#Overlapping_text_in_unit_names
and it outright does not work. No amount of permutations are working for me.

Minor secondary topic/issue - the only other lead I found is that StarForge is quite useful for text stacking, but I can't get it to work after downloading it from the mirror on this site. On launching, it just comes up with an error code. If somebody could tell me where I need to put the StarForge folder, or if there's something else I must do to get it working, that'd be great as well! Thanks for reading and good day/evening/whatever to you

If I'm not mistaken that's not working in remastered. Have to use v1.16.1 or lower.

Text stacking is still possible in the new versions, but they don't match between SD and HD graphics modes. So you have to choose which mode you want it to fit and live with your overlap looking broken on the other. I'm not sure why the other methods stopped working.

There may not be a consistent formula for the HD font as it's not a bitmap font and is subject to varying amounts of spacing between different letters (kerning). The SD font is much more predictable; someone hosted an "overlapping generator" site using the algorithm I provided to them (though it's now offline, unfortunately). I haven't bothered with text stacking in a while because of the inconsistency between SD and HD, so I'll have to review my notes to provide a complete formula.

Here are examples for unit names and display texts:

The square brackets are only to show the trailing and leading spaces, don't include them in the actual strings.

The gist of it is that the <12> tag ("Right Align") pushes the latter half of the string to the right edge of the text field, and the space characters are used to push it back to the left, where it eventually overlaps with the first half.

Display texts must be an exact amount of pixels, so you may have to use one character that is smaller than spaces to achieve the precise length (optionally hidden using the "invisible" color tag, <14>). Unit names always work using only spaces but still have to be within a certain length or the text gets resized or possibly truncated. Color tags do not contribute towards the text's length, so you can add as many as you want. I'll get back to you later with the formula or something.

Excellent! I'm just glad somebody has even made an algorithm, I was beginning to wonder if it might be lost knowledge, or completely impossible on new versions. I always play on standard graphics, I find them to be much more charming and nostalgic, as good as the new sprites are, but I wonder what the consensus amongst the community is. Not much point in going for an SD stack(the only one I'd do) if nobody is going to see it. hmmmm. Well I'd still like to know the method if you're willing to share it, for my own sake if nothing else