Official Feedback wanted : new text engine

Hi, may i know how to get outline working?
this is what i have on my uxml file

<ui:Label text="Settings" display-tooltip-when-elided="true" name="settings-text" style="-unity-text-align: upper-center; font-size: 30px; -unity-font-style: bold; -unity-text-outline-width: 5px; -unity-text-outline-color: red; color: rgb(160, 252, 255);" />

but i do not see any outline either on the canvas or when i run the game.

Does it have to be some special font that supports outline?
Because from my understanding, in TMP outline is achieved through shader.
Any help on getting an outline displayed will be appreciated!

 

Thanks for the reply!
yes i've tried that too but still no luck.
I've even did a simple script to set the outline in C#

Label txt = rootElement.Q<Label>("settings-text");

if (txt == null)

{

    print("label not found");

    return;

}

else

    print("label found");

txt.style.unityTextOutlineWidth = 10;

txt.style.unityTextOutlineColor = Color.red;

But still the same, no outline is observed.

Is there a sample project that i can download to see the correct setup?

 

ok i've made the following edit to the first item in the file Text_BasicStyleTags.uxml which is part of the UI Toolkit Sample.

<ui:UXML xmlns:ui="UnityEngine.UIElements" xmlns:uie="UnityEditor.UIElements" editor-extension-mode="False">
<ui:VisualElement class="background">
<ui:Label text="Rich Text Tags" class="title" style="-unity-font: resource(&apos;Fonts &amp; Materials/Bangers&apos; -unity-font-style: normal; font-size: 35px; -unity-text-outline-width: 5px; -unity-text-outline-color: red;" />

But i am still not seeing any outline..
Appreciate your advise on where i'm doing it wrong.. Or best if you can send me a link to a working outline sample. Thanks!

 

Hi, it would be awesome to finally get a feature-rich native text system internally updated! Therefore I am interested in what you have to say @antoine-unity about what Anthony Blackett was putting forward. Do you plan to one day get rid of the actual outdated or weirdly updated systems at least when first installing a new project?

About the "weirdly updated" I was for instance reffering to the fact that the main TextMeshPro developer seems to be working mainly alone, copying some of the Unity teams updates and integrating it to TMPro, which seems fine for an external Asset but very odd for an asset Unity owns.

 

Will the new text engine use unity sprite atlases? Text mesh pro sprites are good but it’d be nice to be able to have unity pack the atlases so sprites can be added and removed more easily.

 

Can we use rich text in the editor, a.k.a. UIElements, without having to import any packages?

 

Adding text shadow to a label should not require right clicking the font and creating a "font asset" (which I have no idea what it is for). There should be a progressive disclosure of complexity - and quite often Unity's UI tends to throw the entire arsenal of settings at us all at once. I wish the UI toolkit could start veering in a better direction.

 

Am I using this wrong or is it not supported? 2021.1.7 with UIToolkit and Builder preview14 installed.

<ui:TextElement enable-rich-text="true" text="<Link>Testing</Link>" />

Syntax - Xml is not valid, exception during parsing: System.Xml.XmlException: '<', hexadecimal value 0x3C, is an invalid attribute character. Line 10, position 59.

[edit] So it seems we must use &lt; and &gt; which is not nice, but fine.
I can still not get any styles defined in the TextStyleSheet to actually show up though, only the ones listed in that google doc. (I'm making runtime UI , not Editor)

 

Is the new text engine only capable of doing inner outlines? These look pretty bad on small fonts, an 'outer outline' is preferable (drawing the outline behind the characters, essentially)

 

Hi I admit to not having used UIToolkit yet, but the major issue with all text in Unity has been it's tendency to not look great in 1080p or below (or non-4k) resolutions. The pixel snapping is not quite good enough - and compares poorly to other apps. I think there was/is a windowed mode UI issue with odd dimensions also - suddenly all text goes soft!!

Are things any different with UIToolkit? Are bitmap fonts still the best way to get the sharpest text in this instance (which is not great if supporting a range of resolutions)?

e.g. this screen grab is from the Unity hub - the verticals in particular are poorly pixel snapped in many cases.
Native Windows apps get around this with sub-pixel smoothing (ClearType)

 

Is it correct to assume that none of this will be back ported?
I've build a Markdown renderer and editor for UI Elements which works fairly well, but its designed to be compatible with Unity 2018+
The features made available by this rich text system seems like it would improve the performance during Geometry change events which is one of the biggest problems I'm facing, which is a result of the text being broken into a label per word to deal with layouting requirements

It would be ideal if I didn't end up with two implementations I've been able to maintain compatibility between 2018 and 2021 without using TextCore/TextEngine but it would be nice to not build an entirely separate system on this new feature for newer versions of Unity to take advantage of this.

 

When will support rich text string for TextFields??? want to use <sprite>tag.

 

Is there a product manager for game UI at Unity?

Can we hear from this person?

 

Will there be an API available to integrate custom tags into the system, say I wanna have a shake/Vibrate tag that i want to implement or any gameplay effects, how do I go about doing that?

I really hope that this new text engine becomes a go-to solution instead of having to buy a custom text engine for just simple effects all the time.

 

So that it's not (again) forgotten and ignored, posting about this here as well: moving to TextCore is all well and nice, but if the price is that you make everyone's eyes bleed on default 100% scale monitor resolutions I don't think that's right.

Case 1336734 (Closed) [Regression] Font Rendering in the Editor is broken, again

In a nutshell: on a 100% scaled screen, as basically every designer is using, text on 2021.2 (where many parts of the editor UI have been moved to TextCore), is blurry, hard to read, and somehow Unity is firm on saying that this is by design. All advances in font rendering at small resolutions, e.g. for professional tools, seem to be void here.

There's an issue tracker link for the issue as well: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...h-dull-text-rendering-in-the-inspector-window (incorrectly marked as "no regression", this is a regression)

I can only encourage everyone to vote on this. Yes, some people care about readability, and no, not everyone will magically be on Retina screens overnight.

 

Hi. I used UGUI for main UI and UI Toolkit for something experimental UI and debug UI. In this case, should I create and manage two types of font assets? Text>Font Asset and TextMeshPro > Font Asset.

Is there any method that using unified font asset for both UGUI and UI Toolkit?

 

I tested and couldn't get

<sprite name="spriteName">

to work. Is it not supported yet?

<sprite index=1>

and

<sprite="assetName" index=1>

work, but

<sprite="assetName" name="spriteName">

doesn't work either.

 

Can someone shed some light on it?

 

Any ETA on when

<sprite name="spriteName">

will be supported?

 

I can honestly say I didnt have custom tags in mind but will defiantly bring it back to the dev team see if its something we can add.
The Text system will be modular enough for generation where you will be able to modify the layout, parsing, and generation results. The final design on how this will work is still in progress but using one or all of the options you would be able apply a "shake" to the text.

That being said if you have more example of tags you'd like to implement let us know a strong use case always helps decisions.

 

I will have to take a look at your specific example but not all tags supported just yet its on the list of things to correct though no current ETA.

 

I think this asset should be a pretty good example for having custom tags:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/text-animator-for-unity-158707
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/super-text-mesh-57995

There are a few more on the Asset Store, but considering we can't really have another text system for UI elements as we could for game-object based UI system, it would really make a lot of gameplay effects really difficult to implement or seem hacked on top. it would also make it hard to ensure compatibility between multiple asset maybe offering different text effects on Asset Store (in future).

The new overlay system is a good example as to how something built in to unity could streamline editor tools development and ensure compatibility between multiple tools.

 

After checking one more time with the latest beta we can run (2021.2.0b8), yeah, name attribute works.

Spoiler: Tags for testing

Created UITK and TMP Sprite Assets from EmojiOne texture
<sprite index=0>
<sprite="UITK-EmojiOne" index=1>
<sprite name="EmojiOne_2">
<sprite="UITK-EmojiOne" name="EmojiOne_3">

<sprite index=0>
<sprite="TMP-EmojiOne" index=1>
<sprite name="EmojiOne_2">
<sprite="TMP-EmojiOne" name="EmojiOne_3">

But I noticed that changing Scale of the Glyph Rect doesn't work.

BTW, will UITK Sprite Asset work the same as TMP Sprite Asset regarding updating Glyph Rects in real time instead of pressing Play Mode every time?

 

Hi RunninglVlan,

I am very curious how you got this to work? According to this thread, https://forum.unity.com/threads/sprite-asset-regression.1129589/#post-7441535, sprite asset it broken and the push hasn't been fixed yet. Are you on a developer build that the rest of us don't have yet?

 

Check this out: https://forum.unity.com/threads/tex...eating-new-sprite-asset.1074993/#post-7389134
You can add TextCore package using name in UPM

 

I fixed the Sprite Glyph scale not working with UI Toolkit.

It will take a few weeks for this fix to land. I will be backporting this fix to Unity 2021.2.

 

Any chance of getting support for TextMeshPro's automatic font resize functionality in UIToolkit? It's very useful and quite annoying to re-implement

 

Cool, can we track the progress somewhere?

 

Is there a particular reason why you can't just expose the ability to set an arbitrary TextMeshPro material on some text? It seems like UIToolkit is slowly re-implementing pieces of TextMeshPro like outline, but why not leverage all the existing great tooling you have?

 

A suggestion: when you good folk implement the <link> tag, please make it like in TMPro so that there are events upon hovering and clicking the tagged content so that we can use it to make more than just links. Like making those particular words trigger a tooltip or something of the sort. Thank you!

 

Not sure if this is the right place to add this, but if the Style tags and Stylesheet is coming back, please make it runtime-editable.

I'm not sure why this isnt the case for TMPro proper, but we've had to make local modifications to do this.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/creating-custom-styles-in-runtime.942154/#post-6150382

 

How about an abstract "Text" component so that I can do "GetComponent<Text>().text = "I am a button" without having to worry at all if it is a UGUI Text, a TextMeshPro Text, a 3D Text or any other kind of text component. Would solve a lot of problems.

 

Is there any progress on this? UI Builder only has the useless options of letter/word/paragraph spacing,

 

I asked about line-height and text alignments awhile ago and this is the answer:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/textcore-integration-roadmap.1155392/