Force ElvUI to use Friz Quadrata TT

I am in a period of UI experimentation and decided to give ElvUI another shot. Having wiped everything out and going back to the basics leaves me with nothing to lose if it decides to take out my keybinds again, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I’d pretty – I’ll grant it that – but the fonts it uses are terrible. It even rewrites the default font used by the system, so that when you disable ElvUI the character nameplates use a cramped PT Sans Narrow instead of the Friz Quadrata TT that has been a hallmark of World of Warcraft since 2004.

So I was fiddling with it this morning and couldn’t for the life of me change everything in the user interface. The TukUI forums suggested a set of alternate addons or modifying the LUA but I started going, wait, what, why all this just to fix the fonts?

Then I figured the right way to fix it, as with anything on a computer, is to get into the command line and write a shell script.

The following script removes all of the fonts that ship with ElvUI and replaces them with symbolic links to a font of your choosing. I chose Friz Quadrata TT, which I downloaded and placed in my ~/Library/Fonts directory. The symlinks fool ElvUI and World of Warcraft into thinking they’re using the ugly default fonts, but the files they pull up are the font you directed them to.

#! /bin/sh

sourcefont=~/Library/Fonts/frizquadratatt.ttf
elvdir=~/Dropbox/Warcraft/Interface/Addons/ElvUI/media/fonts

for elvfont in Action_Man.ttf DieDieDie.ttf Continuum_Medium.ttf Homespun.ttf PT_Sans_Narrow.ttf
do
rm -v $elvdir/$elvfont
ln -s $sourcefont $elvdir/$elvfont
done

Use at your own risk. No warranty provided, this has the RM command in it so it deletes crap, only works on my computer, etc..

I might try some different fonts – Friz Quadrata looks nice at the larger sizes (8+) but it’s not the best display font for the teeny tiny buttons and chat windows.

That said, it’s an improvement over the defaults.