Question Arabic support

When unity will support Arabic in TMP?

 

Probably never, unfortunately. Unity's RTL in TMP is absolutely awful as it stands, especially when it comes to anything that will involve ligatures. People have been requesting this be fixed for over five years now but there's been absolutely no progress made. Your best bet is to use the RTLTMPro extension here: https://github.com/pnarimani/RTLTMPro

 

At this point, I doubt its ever going to be supported.

When I was visiting studios for Unity in Middle East, Asia and Europe; Arabic support was very high on the list of requests. I hassled so much internally at Unity for years but it was always deemed lower priority or blocked by other tech needing other tech first. Now that R&D roles have been reshuffled and priorities shifted to UIToolkit its likely been lost again.

AFAIK, right now Unity is the ONLY major off-the-shelf engine that does not support this officially.

 

This is very upset since open source engine like godot supported it in version 4.

 

I just want to know is this very difficult and expensive for them to support RTL languages? since godot the open source engine did this.

 

The main reasons that Godot got support for it quickly is that the engine is open source (And so community can contribute features and fixes), the engine is alot smaller in size (less tech debt to deal with) and its not part of a corporation that has many layers of processes to deal with to get anything into engine-trunk.

Unity does have the resources and studio-demand to implement Arabic support but its so far low down the priority list set by Execs and Product Managers that the resources aren't allocated to do it. Does adding Arabic support make the stock price go up? Most likely not, but it would make hundreds of studios and developers very happy and their players in-turn very happy too.

 

Even the general communication for it to us end users was never promising. I remember it being "a few months out" in 2021, then "later in the year" in 2022, then basically radio silence in 2023. This is all after how this has been requested feature since TMP's acquisition in 2017.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/support-arabic-language-rtl-languages.1178152/#post-8036798

This entire thread, both in its age and that it's about requesting a basic feature, is depressing.

 

Technically, Unity Users could do the same. Pool resources, and make better TMP with Blackjack and other things, then release it under MIT.

Unity provides fairly thin wrapper around FreeType, you can access glyph data directly, at some point I (for some reason) wrote my own text component on top of that, so I think you could handle RTL and ligatures properly.

The question here is, though, why Unity User should bother. It is a job of unity team.

 

They didn't even bother to make a GitHub repo so people could make pull requests. Instead, the original author was basically toiling alone on a quintessential engine feature for years.

 

perhaps @karl_jones knows what happened with this?

 

This is what we use, it is pretty effective. There are however, a lot of other little things that we have to do that aren't easily covered by the text component. (layout issues, inline icons,markup, etc.). Sadly, there is no simple magic bullet fix. Ideally you consider in the design and don't get stuck trying to fix it as an afterthought.

 

The idea was not to cooperate with unity and expect them to incorporate anything into the engine, but to make your own independent repo, community driven.