TextMesh Pro Arabic Support

I've been adding Arabic support to my game lately through Text Mesh Pro and I must say that the support currently available is.. terrible.

TMPro has support to enable RightToLeft which is good. However it also flips latin numbers which isn't correct. It also doesn't correct the font for Arabic so it is unreadable. There are some great open-source plugins out there but those require changing all components away from Unitys default TMProLabels which isn't ideal.

What would be needed to get great Arabic support:

• Automatic recognition of Arabic characters and if found, enable RightToLeft and a manual bool to force RightToLeft.
• Automatic correction of character offsets (similar to how Easy Alphabet Arabic plugin has a function to correct it).
• No flipping of latin numbers. Also Easy Alphabet Arabic has a nice feature to convert latin to arabic numbers.
• All this above handled whenever text in the label changes so developers don't need to worry about it.

My current solution to handle this is so terribly hacked to get it working with TMPro that I want to cry.

 

I do plan on improving / adding proper support for Arabic text in TextMesh Pro but that is a longer term undertaking.

In the meantime, I do recommend taking a look at the following free plugin. As per your point, this requires using another component but that is something that I am discussing with the author of the plugin to try to avoid. I'll try to provide an update on this later this week.

 

TMPro is amazing so I really look forward to it. And yes, the free plugin handles it brilliantly but requires swapping components and I know from experience that this always ends up biting one in the ass sooner or later

Something that could go a long way in TMPro would be a callback for when text is being changed (with the changed text in the callback) so one could format it however one wanted. Then it would be easy to say input Easy Arabic or something similar to fix most issues.

Right now I ended up in a race condition thing where things weren't updated after I tried to fix the arabic characters etc

 

That is something that I am considering in the short term.

 

That would be awesome. Then one could just pass the text through the RTLTMPro open source code functions if the current language is Arabic, even handle the setting of the RightToLeft bool there with help from RTLTMPro functions.

Do it! I'll give you a gold star.

 

Are there any updates on adding Arabic support to TMPro?
A current workaround solution is:
* enable `isRightToLeftText`
* set `alignment` to `TextAlignmentOptions.TopRight`
* Use ArabicFixer.Fix on the text
* Reverse the text and output it.
But if the game is multilingual, doing this to each text would be overkilling.
It would be great if you can support Arabic naively.

 

If nothing else, thank you for this – it worked like a charm.

 

It doesn't show Arabic letters it's just squares even when I changed the font to Arabic font

 

I know this isnt ideal but until they fix it you can just type the text you want in an external image editor like paint.net with the font you want with no background then sav eit as an image and import that without any compression and setting the filter mode to point, gave me decent quality text, ofcourse its a hassle because you will need to have an app open but its not gonna take 30 seconds more than it would of taken with tmp (issues do arise when you dont want just regular black text without effects tho)

 

That's a comically good solution, if any. I suppose one could push the enveloppe and add an alpha channel.