TextMesh Pro - Advanced Text Rendering for Unity - Beta now available in Asset Store

Congratz on the release! Hopefully you'll start getting a lot more feedback now.

 

Thank you!


In terms of feedback, the pattern has been a few questions as the user gets familiar with TMPro and then they go on to doing what they needed to do. Unless something goes wrong or not as expected, I don't hear much. That is a good thing but still leaves me with wanting more feedback or at least wanting to see what they are doing with TMPro

 

Minor update: To anyone who visited the TMPro Forum, I had viewing images / videos disabled for guests ... oops ... all fixed now so you can see some additional pretty images and videos.

 

Beta Release 0.1.41
Submitted a new version for Unity's review which includes the following minor changes.

• First implementation of Sorting Layers.
• Changed the default setting for Perspective Filter in some of the shaders. See a previous post above for a description of what Perspective Filter does
• Added new keywords to the package to (try) to improve search results in the Asset Store.
• Cleaned up some of the code.

Since it is now almost 4:00 AM, it is time for me to go to bed. I'll be back in the morning and looking forward to everyone's feedback

 

May be you can start with "simple" implementation which affects only font size as feature is quite useful? Also except of shrinking, trimming of text which doesn't fit is a must have too as for me.

 

Just bought TextMesh Pro. Looks good so far, although I haven't done any direct comparisons yet (will do soon as I evaluate switching all the textmeshes in the game for it). Our game has a lot of visual novel like text (it appears one letter at a time inside a chatbox). TextMesh Pro solves a lot of problems (trying to keep the text somewhat sharp at a variety of resolutions was an absolute pain), but I have a couple of problems with it as well.

1) As the text appears in the game (on character at a time) and a line gets completed and it goes to the next line, if the first character of the next line is wider, it becomes the left-most point of the mesh and the previous lines move a bit to the right. I know I didn't explain it very well, but I think it will be better understood with an image.



See how the '1's at the first three lines moved to the right as soon as I added the A? The final result is, as more lines are added, the top lines seem to nudge to the right a bit.

2) My second problem isn't really TextMesh Pro's fault exactly, but I would be really glad if a solution could be found. It's about wrapping. The game currently has manual break lines, which is something I really want to get rid of. The wrapping in TextMeshPro works... as it should, which isn't good enough for me. Because the text appears one character at the time, a word might start forming in one line, but end up at the next line.


I'm looking into the TextMeshPro api to find something that might help, but I can't find anything. I need to somehow to be able to know if the length of the line once the current word is completed, is going to bigger than the set Line Length, because if it is, I want the word to start forming at the next line from the beginning.

 

In terms of the anchor being higher than the yellow rectangle, that is due to the anchor being located at the top Ascender (highest point of the character set) which is typically the "$" character. That way as you type lower case followed by upper case, the anchor doesn't move up and down.

With respect to the left side, the reason is that some characters in the TTF files have a negative offset for x. So they don't all start at 0 for instance. I think the solution might be for me to do the same as what I do vertically, which is find the character with the left most offset and use that as the left margin. Without doing that, the left alignment would be wrong.

I am not sure I understand the exact behavior that you want. Do you have a predetermined area (space / length) for the text to live in? I presume you want some wrapping but somehow the length is too short and it wraps sooner than you want? If you haven't registered on the TMPro forum, do so and give me more information about this so I can help you out.

You can change the lineLength via the API ... http://digitalnativestudios.com/textmeshpro/docs/ScriptReference/TextMeshPro-lineLength.html

 

That would be great, it would fix the issue I'm having.

I registered on the forums (and you just approved me), so I'll continue this discussion there, where it's more appropriate.

 

An Auto Sizing feature is definitely something I am planning on adding. I just need to come up with a method that works well.

TMPro gives you a lot of control over adjusting text to fit a given area. It is just the automatic way that is most challenging to implement (AI for text ).

BTW: Isn't having text of different sizes on screen sort of a typography no no from a design / visual look? I just make the tool so if someone wants to make ransom note looking stuff of all different sizes and styles, that's ok with me I am just curious.

Can you elaborate on this trimming and what you would expect to happen?

BTW: TMPro already has masking + softness control over the mask. The feature isn't fully implemented but the idea along with this auto sizing stuff is to also include a mode where characters (text) which exceeds a given area would be masked.

Here is a rough example on text that is centered

 

We use auto-shrinking just for some cases where something like really big player name (with lots of W ) or some text on another language doesn't fit in "designed" place if your remark was about it.

Just cut the text off if it doesn't fit the length
https://db.tt/5EpTkUON - 2nd text has clipping/trimming enabled

 

What behavior do you think would be best for your needs in terms of how cut-off is handled?

1. Cut off (hard or soft) at the bound displaying a partial letter.



2. Cut off a full word if it doesn't fit completely.

 

I would say go for part of word + "..." (which is standard in many desktop frameworks) or soft cut off with part of letter (which may look more game/3D oriented).
Words aren't an option as they they can be quite long ("International" and this word is totally game related ).

 

I posted a solution for your left margin issue on the TMPro Forum.


Now your second item was more of a feature request and required a bit more but I believe I have found a workable solution. I am posting it here because I guess the solution is a new feature



I also made a video detailing the issue and solution.


The new property is TextMeshPro.maxVisibleCharacters which allows a user to control the number of visible characters. This can be animated to enable things like a reveal.

 

Oh one last question,
Support mobile device right?

 

Of course

TMPro includes shaders optimized for mobile. On the TMPro User Forum, you can watch the mobile SDF shader video as well as the Surface Shaders' video which also covers the Mobile Surface version. Although the normal SDF and Surface shaders aren't labeled as mobile they still work on most mobile devices.

Even the full surface shader which is really designed for desktop works on an iPad 2 for instance. It might work on older version but I don't have one to test

 

Made a small implementation change to the "TextMeshPro.maxVisibleCharacters" where instead of using vertex color with alpha at zero to hide them, I decided to simply make the non-visible vertices degenerate.

Here is another animated gif on plain old Arial with Underlay to add subtle shadow underneath and a gradient texture using the horizontal (paragraph mapping mode).

 

Ok done purchase
and if anyone need to use Thai character but lazy to type all symbol copy this and paste to your font asset creator.

กะขาฃิคีฅุฆูงโจเฉชำซไฌใญฎฏฐฑฒ์ณัดฯตึถืท่ธ้น๊บ๋ป็ผแฝพฟภมยรลวศษสหฬอฮ๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙๐ๆ1234567890!?.,abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ<>()[]{}/\+-*=_^%$@#'";|:~`

I think I got all symbolic to use for Thai language.

feedback.
create character by file can't enter space on it make it hard to do correction.

 

Thank you!

Make sure you register on the TMPro Forum so you can post and share some of your work. Would be cool too see game titles / text in Thai

Thanks for the feedback. I fixed the issue but when I rebuilt the package, I forgot to recompile the plugin for the Mac If the space character is the first one on the list, it should work.

 

Awesome.

Saw the changes in the TMPro forums as well, but I wanted to chime in here as well to say that I am really excited with the response I am getting from you guys regarding whatever issues I have with TMPro.

 

Just doing our best to make sure TextMesh Pro lives up to everyone's expectations.

Keep on providing us feedback and please keep on sharing / showing me what you are doing with it

 

The answer to this is probably really obvious, but the string you input for the text mesh can be modified at runtime, right?

Less obvious question: How hard will it be to extend the included sharers to add some rendering features that might not be packed in?

I'm working on a project that would definitely benefit from this extension, and I will definitely be purchasing when I need it. Thanks for making this.

 

Yes.

In addition, you can also use TextMeshPro.SetCharArray or TextMeshPro.SetText which would spare you from having to concatenate strings on the calling side which generates GC.

It all depends on your shader programming skill levels

If you feel like sharing, I would like to know what rendering features you have in mind.

BTW: TextMesh Pro's shaders are highly optimized for both Desktop and Mobile platforms.

You are welcome.

 

Absolutely love this- I've been watching the forum for asset store release for weeks. Happy to say it works exactly as I'd hoped- I have a game with a menu that does a lot of zooming in, and this worked perfectly for that. It looks fantastic. Great job.

Would it be possible to expose the SDF generating bit of code in a simple inspector- would be nice to be able to convert things like one colour logos into SDF textures for use with the shader (I assume a suitably setup SDF texture would work with the shader?)

 

Thanks

Here are a couple of ways this could be done. The first is using some third party font (ttf) creation tool where you would create a font that contains one color (binary) icons / logos / objects which you would map to some character. Using TextMesh Pro's built-in Font Asset Creator and this custom font, you could generate an SDF Font Asset out of it. (This option works now. Here is a post related to this)

Another option is that I do have (somewhere) code I was using to debug the SDF creation process where I was using a texture as an input. A simple Component + Inspector could be created to use those.

Lastly and one of the features I would like to add is to give users the ability to mix and match Font Assets (both SDF and Bitmaps) in the same text object. Essentially, the text mesh would include sub-meshes with their own material / shader assigned to them.


In terms of new features, I already have a good list of exciting things that I would like to add to TextMesh Pro. Hopefully, it will do well enough on the Asset Store to keep me busy for months adding cool new features and supporting our users


Sort of related to text and icons / objects ... here is a video I created for a user. This is using bitmap fonts with TextMesh Pro but still something that is available to all of its users.

 

I have just noticed this new asset, impressive features!

Sorry if this has been asked before, it's a long thread: does TextMesh Pro support right to left languages (or more specifically: Arabic)?

 

It does not at this time. I will have to add this to my list of potential features and definitely read up on Arabic and Right to Left language implementation / support.

BTW: Does Unity support right to left languages?


The built-in Font Asset Creator can raster various ranges of characters. Here is an example (btw: I just picked some random range of Arabic characters to render.) So this would be mostly a layout thing...

 

What do you think might be causing this? it happens on my mobile platforms, in both ortho and persecutive. the shader is set to mobile and regular text mesh is not effected. noticed it when swapping out regular text for the pro. the pro text disappears after a few secs. normal text does not. Also there are no scripts used, its just a instruction scene.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/140190317/20140525_151626.mp4

 

I am going to need more information.

Let's get you registered on the TMPro Forum so I can better assist you. Plus whatever the solution it is likely to be helpful to other users as well

I'll be looking for your registration to approve it (within minutes of the request) ... Once that is done, post in the support section and give me more info / example of your script. It is hard to tell in the video when the swap occurs (other than the bottom object disappears) I presume that is when the swap occurs ... You mentioned mobile, ie. is the behavior the same on your desktop?

Let's get this little mystery solved


P.S. to post code on the TMPro forum, use the

Code (csharp):

1.  followed  /code in square brackets.
2.  
3. Edit: I approved your registration about 15 minutes ago, but you haven't logged in yet. I'll keep looking for your post to help you out.

 

Turns out the issue was related to having "Multithreaded Rendering" enabled in the Player Settings for Android. Not sure if Unity fully supports this option and why it was causing some objects to disappear after some random amount of time.

 

It would be awesome if TextMesh Pro had this

Arabic is tricky, and RtL languages in general have been #7 top feature on the Unity Feedback site for a while now...

Single character rendering is usually alright, the problem is that characters look different depending on if they are on their own or in the middle of a word, etc.

We have been using this asset to bend Unity's and 2D Toolkit's text renderers to display Arabic correctly: http://u3d.as/2B8. This mostly works, but is of course a bit awkward to work with.

 

I'll definitely take a look at this but it will have to wait until the official release of TMPro.

 

Here is a glimpse at some of the new functionality that will be available in TextMesh Pro with the release of Unity 4.6.

• New Text Alignment options Masking using the new RectTransform
• New TextMesh Pro GUI Component designed to work with UGUI

 

@ ortin: If you take a look at the previous video, auto-sizing is on its way.

With regards to clipping / masking here is a preview.

Hard Mask


Soft Mask


Clipping



These are kind of grainy since they are gifs but that should give you a feel for those features.

 

Hi. Is there a way to add hyperlinks to words, or any sort of marker so I could detect a click on a specific word inside a paragraph of dynamically generated text?

 

Such functionality isn't available at this time. It is one of the items on my list of features to add. I am hoping the product will do well enough to warrant me adding tons of features over the months to come

Having said all of that, the following property give you access to the mesh / data structure. Which contains all the information necessary to track the location of each individual characters and then some.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. public TMPro_MeshInfo MeshInfo
3.         {
4.             get { return m_meshInfo; }
5.         }
6.  
7.  
8. // From a different file added here for your benefit...
9. public class TMPro_MeshInfo
10.     {
11.         public TMPro_CharacterInfo[] characterInfo;
12.         public int characterCount;
13.         public Mesh mesh;
14.         public Vector3[] vertices;
15.         public Vector2[] uv0s;
16.         public Vector2[] uv2s;
17.         public Color32[] vertexColors;
18.         public Vector3[] normals;
19.         public Vector4[] tangents;
20.     }
21.        
22.  
23.     // Structure containing information about each Character  related Mesh info for the text object.  
24.     public struct TMPro_CharacterInfo
25.     {    
26.         public char Character;
27.         public short LineNumber;
28.         public short CharNumber;
29.         public short index;
30.         public short vertexIndex;
31.         public Vector3 BottomLeft;
32.         public Vector3 TopRight;
33.         public float TopLine;  
34.         public float BaseLine;
35.         public float BottomLine;
36.         public float AspectRatio;
37.         public float Scale;
38.         public Color32 color;
39.         public FontStyles style;    
40.         public bool isVisible;
41.     }
42.  

For instance, if you added a collider to the TextMesh Pro object, you could then raycast against it and do a simple Rectangle intersection to find which character you are targeting.

BTW: The functionality that you are looking for used to be there many months ago. Here is an old video of it. It was removed when I decided that it should be part of a separate component that could be added to a TMPro object to support live editing for example. Another type of component that could be added is an Advanced Layout Component to have text follow a curve or spline.

 

Hey Stephan,

It's great to hear that you will have a TMP component for uGUI, awesome!

Regarding auto-sizing, it would be nice (as an option) to be able to specific the default font size that is used as the max font size and have TMP scale the text down, if needed. In other words, never scale the text greater than the specified font size.

Thanks!

 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I guess I could add a Min / Max font scaling size where the Max can be set automatically to what the original point size was. These properties could be changed via API or obviously in the Inspector.

 

That is great info, thanks for it. I am finishing the specs for an upcoming project and this puts TMPro into the picture, as I was in need of better TextMeshes but also needed the ability to identify the word clicked.

 

Link to the Asset Store Forum Thread...

 

On the first page, there is an example of font styling texturing progression. Here is an Animated GIF of roughly how this look was achieved.

 

TextMesh Pro Surface Shader Web Demo

This scene shows a few TextMesh Pro text objects. The Logo is using the Surface Shader and as such it is affected by scene lighting. The caption text below this logo is using the normal distance field shader.




The text on the right wall (on the left since I am being the logo object) is being generated via code and using the TextMeshPro.maxVisibleCharacter property which allows a user to control how many characters will be displayed. Please note that word wrapping is used.




The level text in the background is also being generated via code. It is also using a Surface Shader. The _GlowPower property is being animated using an animation curve.




The frame counter in the top right as well as the camera controls in the bottom right are also TextMesh Pro objects using Overlay mode.




Here is a link to the web demo of this scene.

 

Spotted this, dunno if you were aware of it or not.

 

I guess there were two issues. The first which is what I thought your were pointing to was a Sorting Layer issue with the Overlays which I changed.

The other issue is a result of a combination of things. First we are using Perspective Filtering when viewing the text at sharp angles which softens it so it looks better as the camera pans around. Seconds, I was using Softness on the Underlay as well as on the Face of the Text ... all of which combined results in what you observed at those sharp angles.

I have since tweaked the scene reduced the amount of softness and now you should not be able to observe this at sharp angles.

Good catch

 

Here is a 2nd video showing a new feature of TextMesh Pro which will become available when Unity 4.6 is released.

 

Hello Stephan B,
1. Is there anyway to get the line count if the text auto-wrapping?
I need to show only 3 lines but I can't predict how long the word coming from user.
2. Can I manual set the space(32) distance? It's not show to setting in glyph Info.
Thank you,
Civalice
Ps. I'm waiting on approval on forum so I ask you here.

 

That is not in the API right now but let me see what I can do here. Please re-post you request on our user forum. I am working on a new release but until it is available on the Asset Store, I should be able to give you code changes on this at some point today.

The space (32) should be in the Glyph Info panel which would enable you to change its Advance value. If you can link me the font that you are using I can check to see if there is some potential reason why it might not show up for that font. [/quote]

I approved your request on the User Forum.

 

Just a small update for you on this Civalice...

I added some new properties in the API today which are:

TextMeshPro.characterCount
int characterCount;

TextMeshPro.lineCount
int lineCount;

The lineCount returns the number of lines factoring in WordWrapping. characterCount returns the number of visible characters which excludes the tags. I also added another property to allow control over the number of lines that can be displayed. If maxVisibleLines was set to 2 on text that ends up using 3 lines due to wordwrapping, then the third line would not be visible.

TextMeshPro.maxVisibleLines
int maxVisibleLines;

This new property is similar in use to the TextMeshPro.maxVisibleCharacters.

 

Thank you very much! This really help me a lot!

Issue closed, I create font use the "Character from file" option adding space(32) in the first character of the file. (First I add it in the middle of the file but it not generate for me and I didn't know why)

I'm working on my own custom word wrapping and create my own way using Kerning table info. On Glyph table I change space(32) glyph parameter Advance to 0 (so space will didn't show on text anymore) and adding kerning pair with (32) and (32) and adding offset value to 20. then the word I need to make wrapping I just add space and if I really need space I just add 2 space and it work like a charm!

 

You are welcome. These new properties will be in the next version

Characters with Zero width like space(32) or Non-breaking space(160) that are not first in the list will blow up on the Mac side. Until I release a new plugin / version just make sure they are first in the list of characters to generate.

Glad things are working out. If you need anything, be sure to post on the TextMesh Pro user forum. Thanks again for using TextMesh Pro

 

Take a look at this new post in the Asset Store thread showing the various texturing option available in TextMesh Pro.