Official Feedback wanted : new text engine

Hi,
thanks for adding this feature set! I've been really looking forward to it, keep up the good work. I would like to know if

text-shadow

is supposed to work on Buttons? Because it seems it only works on Labels (I've only seen TextField being mentioned as not working yet).

Thanks!

 

Thanks for the new features!

I noticed that paragraph spacing, word spacing, and character spacing are supported, however, I don't see line spacing. Is this something that is coming soon?

 

Can you make this one the default and if you want to keep the other text options available to users for backward compatibility make those older versions into packages they can install? I don't like that obsolete features are default and new features are packages you have to hunt for, install and manage versions yourself.... it makes no sense.

 

When using large values for the rotate tag it doesn't really render correctly, the next character overlaps with this one(try using 90 or 180)

 

It'd be really great if we can use html tags as well. so setting an html article text render it as good as possible

 

I would like it when the ui builder supports the "Text Panel Settings".
I have a font asset with a fallback font with special characters, and at the moment those are not shown in the uibuilder. because it doesn't know the fallback font.

 

The <rotate> tag only affects the geometry of the characters and not the metrics. As such, the Advance (spacing between characters) is not adjusted which can result in characters overlapping as most of the time their height is greater than their width.

Having said that, what is your use case for the <rotate> tag?

BTW: Most of the projects I have seen using the <rotate> tag in TMP were to sort of style and in some case animate the characters using small rotation angles.

P.S. Please consider making a separate thread for this as it will make it easier for us to continue our conversation about the <rotate> tag and for other users to find it as well over time.

 

The general state of how unity is being developed at the moment is to put all new features into packages that need to be installed separately and also updated separately to the main unity build. I understand why this is the case but I think you need to reverse it. Make unity automatically start with the latest and greatest systems, eg text mesh pro over text mesh and allow users to install older systems through the package manager if they require it for backward compatibility rather than the other way around, especially if that older system is considered obsolete.

 

This is really nice, one feature I am missing that was not mentioned is sprites respecting text order e.g. if sprite has AD < width the following text overlaps the sprite.

 

A common use case is the sprite with Zero Advance being used to define some shape (a coin for instance) where a subsequent character (a number) with adjustment pair defined between the two is displayed on top of the sprite.

What is the use case for subsequent character to be under the sprite?

 

I could have been more clear, sorry. Your use case is exactly what I had in mind. I am setting AD=0 and the text is behind the sprite. E.g.

<sprite=0>10

leads to only the sprite being visible.

 

Thanks for clarifying.

Let me see if I can figure out a way to make this work.

Can you think of a use case where we would not want the subsequent character to be on top of the preceding sprite? Ie. Maybe sprites should always be rendered first.

 

I personally can't really, but you might want to be careful as I guess that <mark> works by drawing a tinted sprite over the text, so this change could turn it into a <background> tag instead. Which could be useful as mark changes the text's color and has to have alpha making background visible.

 

I'm also really interested in a solution for this.

Also, is there any plan to add a feature akin to the TMP Text Info Debug Tool ?

 

How do I set the text-shadow to be a solid color and not <1 alpha? I am trying to use it for the dilate feature and not a shadow.

 

I can confirm that text-shadow doesn't apply to Buttons or Labels that have the Background property set to a color.

I have a few Labels that have backgrounds that don't get the shadow. I am using a label for the element in a ListView that sets the background when the item is selected. The shadow disappears when selected and when the item isn't selected it has the shadow again.

 

Lot of amazing features, great job!

In CSS you can add multiple comma separated text-shadows, something like:

Code (CSharp):

1.   text-shadow: -1px -1px 0 #000,  0 -1px 0 #000;

Will this feature be supported?
This will help to achieve a text outline effect outside the font itself, the actual implementation of the outline which I believe behaves like the css equivalent is currenly "eating inside the font" making it not much usable on small font sizes

 

@Stephan_B is there a way to set the alpha of the text shadow?

Setting the color doesn't seem to affect the alpha, not sure what the procedure is for this.

 

I'm trying to apply -text-shadow but getting this in editor, untested in build:

03YtjU1.png (491×123) (imgur.com)

Here's my css:

Code (csharp):

1. .panel .header Label {
2.     -unity-font-definition: url("/Assets/UI Toolkit/Resources/Fonts & Materials/LiberationSans SDF.asset");
3.     color:white;
4.     -unity-font-style:bold;
5.     text-shadow: 2px 2px 5px black;
6. }

Not sure if bug or I'm missing something?

Unity 2020.2.0b14 (also occurs in 2020.2.0b9)
UI Toolkit 1.0.0-preview.13

 

It does this in uGUI as well, it only has a quad to work with and its only so big. It works better with larger font sizes, the smaller the font the smaller the area to work with so you need to adjust accordingly and 5 pixels is quite large for that font size.

 

Are you planning on keeping the Sprite Asset from TextMeshPro? I really hope you aren't, because they're really rough.

I've spent half a day just today trying to get a handful of new icons aligning properly with text. The only way to do it is to modify the Glyph parameters of every single one of our 100's of icons by hand. It's terrible. And on top of that it doesn't even work with the built-in sprite packer.

Full respect to the folks that work on TextMeshPro. I'm sure the engine underneath is great, but the workflows.. not so much. It'd be great to see these re-built with the new Asset Database and the same level of polish that has gone into the rest of the UI Toolkit.

 

I am having a hard time getting TMP text highlighting to render behind the text rather than above the text.
Using an image UI as the parent object is not helpful, because it does not play well with layouts. (Need to use the text scaling)

I hope this can be sorted out.

 

Working with the C# part of Text Core. What are the steps necessary to go from a FontAsset assigned in the inspector to a StyleFontDefinition I can apply to a VisualElement style?

 

I am using Unity 2020.1.17 and have updated UI Toolkit runtime and builder packages to their latest version.

When inspecting the text properties inside UI Builder, there is the following helpbox :

Rich text properties can be made accessible by installing the latest UI Toolkit package

I see that this helpbox appears if PACKAGE_TEXT_CORE is not defined.
PACKAGE_TEXT_CORE seems to be defined only if the project has the "com.unity.textcore" package, but I am not sure at all that this is available in Unity 2020.1.

Is the new text engine (and UIToolkit Rich Text features) unavailable in Unity 2020.1 ? What about 2020.2 ?

 

Right now UIBuilder setting up Rich Text/FontAssets are out of commission. You can still setup FontAssets but not in the builder. It is only compatible with 2021.1 and UITK preview 13 but preview 13 isn't compatible with 2021.1 so we have to wait until preview 14 comes out and hopefully it will all work..

 

Found some other little annoying bugs.

Having an outline and/or shadow and fading the text does nothing to the outline and/or shadow, it shows with 0 opacity.

I am using the shadow like a glow, so its offset is 0px 0px, however if I modify the uxml in UIBuilder it overwrites those values and puts 0 0 which doesn't work, no shadow is displayed. I have to manually edit my uss to add the px so it will work.

The font asset creator information panel is a fixed size and cannot be made to fit. This is a problem as half of it is cut off for me so I need to scroll to the right to see that part of the info panel. I thought I was able to adjust the atlas view but I cannot. Resizing the window moves the atlas view to the bottom and shows the full info panel, but its now bigger than my screen is tall. Its not a huge deal, only takes a few seconds to make the font asset, but it just makes it take a little longer than before.

 

Is there a way to make a bulleted list using or uss?
Something like css lists
Can I create my own custom tags somehow?

 

Will UIToolKit 1.1 support "

• Support rich text strings for TextFields

"????

 

It's about time you guys get that Getting Started guide out of a Google Doc and into the official documentation!

 

Hi,

I am working on a project where we need to load fonts dynamically, from addressables.
With TextMeshPro, it has been a real pain to implement properly and have it to work as intended since TextMeshPro has no support for addressables.

Do you plan to make this easier with this package ?

The reason we need addressables is to avoid keeping fonts textures that are useless for the currently displayed language (think of Japanese and Chinese fonts being loaded when playing the game in english) to avoid wasting memory.

Edit: Actually, more generally speaking, it would be great to have a way to avoid using "Resources" folders altogether.

 

Hi,

Does the new text field/text input now support Arabic (Right to Left) language properly, with correct ligature?

The current version of TextMeshPro, doesn't support RTL language properly, for proper ligature you need to use a RTL extension.

So is the current Text module suffering from the same defiency? Or did I miss a TMP update?

Thank

 

might be late to the game but, I'm wondering how easily this will handle frame-animated sprites

 

Hi,

thanks for adding these new text features, they work really well!

Please consider adding/exposing this property from TextMeshPro:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...Text.html#TMPro_TMP_Text_maxVisibleCharacters

It's very useful to reveal text over time.

 

Having poked around with this system there's a big feature gap between this package and text mesh pro. As Kirsche said above, the first thing I looked for was a way to render max visible characters like TMPro but there's no easy way. Additionally, not being able to get ahold of vertex/mesh data seems like a big regression from TMPro. Having this encapsulated away means that you cannot procedurally animate text which is something trivial to do in TMPro.

It seems like a step backwards for unity to move to a less powerful text rendering engine when text is such a powerful tool in game design. Would it be possible to have a UITK Text Settings asset that allowed for the direct usage of TMPro for users who wanted the flexibility? The only alternative for users with this requirement would then be mixing old and new GUI systems which seems undesireable, or simply not being able to do achieve the effect they're looking for because the glyphs are out-of-reach.

 

I am on the latest version of both UI Toolkit and UI Builder and I am still seeing this:



What is going on here? Why would UI Builder ask for a newer version if I have the latest version installed? I can't see any reason why this would happen even if there's miscommunication between the two teams, and am utterly confused

 

I asked about it (https://forum.unity.com/threads/feedback-wanted-new-text-engine.1007585/#post-6650386) and it looks like Rich Text (for UITK) and Font Assets are only available from Unity 2021.1 (is it right Unity team ?).

 

Its because to use UIBuilder with the new text features you need 2021.1, but the UITK package is incompatible with it right now. You're stuck manually editing the uss files to add the features. Hope they correct that soon its been almost 2 months (last update was Dec 1, 2020.)

You can use them in 2020.2, just not with UIBuilder.

 

I know you guys probably get this a lot, but I was wondering what is the currently estimated timeframe for Rich text support in UI Toolkit TextFields (preview version)?

 

It still appears to me like this isn't working for button text (Using Preview.14). Any different syntax?

.eButton {
-unity-font-definition: url("/Assets/UI Toolkit/Resources/Fonts & Materials/LiberationSans SDF.asset");
text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px red;
}