Should we allow the EN-JA swap for FF4PR Speedruns?

My testing has concluded that Original Japanese is fastest when it comes to fonts and speed. Followed by Simplified Chinese. English and the JA-EN font swap are both very similar time wise. Any font mods outside of that were significantly slower including a very tiny, thin font.
I timed the intro with different fonts starting from new game start until the "controls" screen appeared.
There was some variance due to ATB in the automated fights at the start of the game but not a lot. I came to the conclusion that any modification to the font was either on par or slower than the normal English font.

So the question is... Do you guys want to allow the font switch mod for Speedruns? Do you want to allow Custom fonts? Please leave your thoughts here or you can message me on discord privately and I will anonymously weigh in for you. I am not voting personally. Either way is fine by me. I just want to get the whole thing settled and behind us.

I have had one person come to me privately and say they like the idea of separate categories for anything modded, and they prefer no custom fonts ie... No wingdings.

Font swap should absolutely be allowed. Admins can restrict it to "original files that came with the game" if they don't want to deal with testing of independently developed fonts. Legibility should not be a gate to running the game, nor for viewers enjoying the run.

Thanks for doing the legwork to confirm that no unfair advantage is gained by such swaps, Buffalax. If someone wants to have the maximum speed, clearly they must run in JP with JP font anyway.

Though even if the JP->EN font pack swap made it faster, I'd still be for allowing it, to be perfectly honest.

I vote to allow font swaps for speedruns

I vote to allow it as well. I see zero reason to exclude that specific use case.

I vote to allow the font swap mod.

I vote to allow for it too. I know others have said it, but thanks buffalax for doing the timing legwork

Looks like a majority of the people want to allow the font swap. I'll give it another day or two to let people chime in, then go from there.

Unless it's an in-game option to set language / font then I vote no.

It's no different to allowing a SNES romhack that has a font adjustment or palette swap while leaving the game mechanics unchanged. If a mod doesn't alter a game to the extent that it warrants a new category then I'm not interested.

In the interest of including as many people running the game as possible, we have decided to update the rules allow the JP<->EN font swap in FF4PR. There are quite a few people who run the game with this font swap in place, which was previously against the rules. We hope that this change will allow more people who enjoy the game to submit their runs and actually be able to read the text.

Please note that custom fonts are still not allowed. This rule change only covers using the included JP font file with the game.