A little bit on the format:
http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=88.0Now, you say this opens a window, so you've probably got both the positioning and size bytes for the window, and the positioning bytes plus text there. The Japanese game uses DTE just like the US game, but its DTE is used to place characters over top of the other characters. Anything in the icon space and above (it starts around $10, before that are control codes) is DTE in the Japanese game - I have a table, but it's on the other PC. That's also why the printing routines do icons separately from the text - they bypass the DTE table to print them.
Control codes are simple enough:
$00: String terminator.
$01: Text terminator. You need positioning bytes for the text that comes after this. A lot of menu text can be stored as a single string. Every option in the main menu is a single string, for instance, the positioning bytes place them 16 pixels below each other.

I should mention that the Japanese DTE is still there in the US menu, they never killed the routine like they did in battle, nor replaced it like the dialogue window. You can actually still make use of it (that's how J2e had a taller font in their translation, they sacrificed storage space for larger text).