Actually you were right. That was an ugly solution.
Anyway, I solved my problem - which turned to be a stupid one, as expected. I got inspired by your russian translation files, specifically by the cyrillic character transcription in your txt files. Simply I wasn't using the right character codes, thus the font files were misnamed. That's why I didn't get to see the special chars. I was basing on a wrong ASCII codes table. Apparently, the codes for certain characters in ANSI coding are different... I'm not quite sure about it.
Never mind, anyway. I can carry on translating now, without weird workarounds, and without messing with the standard version files.

Thanks a bunch for your help  

Thanks to Andrew for the help and the app   I'll compile it soon and try to make the necessary special spanish chars with it.

My main problem stayed, though. The translated text appears in the game, but non-standard characters don't, even with the extra PNG files properly named (after each ASCII code)  and placed in the ".fon" folder.

However, I think I've found a tricky workaround to solve it. There are a few regular characters that the game doesn't use - at least a search through all the comm files didn't find any of them in the game text (",#,+,=,[,\ and ]). So I will replace those with the ones I need. Thus, 34.png (by default ") will depict an 'ñ' character - so should I write for instance in my translation 'España', I'd write 'Espa"a' instead. After the proper and readable translation, a 'Replace All' will do the job, just keeping an eye in system text - to make sure it doesn't get corrupted.

It might not be the right solution for western european language packs (if the core team has intended to do so anytime), but it works for a spanish version, and doesn't mess with the english character set. At last I can go ahead with translations without feeling them useless.

If any of you people find it a crazy idea, please wake me up to my senses before it's too late  

Hi all,

I was thinking about a spanish translation. I can manage pretty well with the translation itself, but I'm still a rookie in coding and don't know in depth the source of UQM yet.

The spanish case turns to be quite simple -at least compared to cyrilic languages-, as the special characters (á,é,í,ó,ú,ü and the one and only "ñ") are easy to obtain editing regular alphabet PNGs. So I was trying to translate the first dialogue scene -for easier playtesting- between Fwiffo and the Player. Already edited part of the txt file, and added to the spathi.fon folder new PNGs named according to the ASCII codes of the special characters above. However, there's something I'm missing, maybe related to the txt files coding, because the special characters still do not appear.

It may be a silly question, but I'd appreciate some indications on what's going wrong  

Thanks in advance.