Question How to force a font to look pixelated/low resolution

Hey all,
When I use a font in photoshop, and make it super small, it becomes pixelated. I'm trying to replicate this pixelated look within my unity project, but all of my attempts still result in a smooth looking font. Please see attached for reference.

Here's what I've attempted, but I'm new to Unity/TextMeshPro so I can certainly be missing something. I'm obviously just guessing at possible solutions here, lol:
1. Reduce font size while increasing TextMeshPro object scale
2. Adjusted with TextMeshPro front Asset Scale, Sampling Point Size, Atlas Width/Height
3. Adjusted the imported Font File Font Size and Rendering Mode
4.Created a new Canvas with a UI Scale Mode set to Scale With Screen and reduced the Reference Resolution and Reference Pixels Per Unity

To get this effect with a sprite is super easy: just create the object in low resolution and then increase the Pixels Per Unity once imported. But I can't seem to get the same effect with fonts.

Any thoughts? Is there a term(s) for this I should be using to search with for this topic?

Thanks!

 

I think you need:

- a UI-text-capable variant of the Transparent Cutout shader (see it in action under the legacy shaders or grab one off the net)
- a non-filtered version of the TMPro Texture, which by default is filtered

I don't have the second part easily doable here, but here's what the first part (cutoff) gets you, the sharp edge (left is cutoff obviously):



Once the font texture has been set to Point sampling then I think you'd get what you want.

That's just using the legacy Unlit/Transparent Cutout shader: (Play with that Alpha cutoff)

 

Thank you very much for the guidance! I'm going to have to read it over a few more times and play around to see if I can get it to work. It seems pretty surprising I can't simply make a super small canvas with large font lol.

 

Yanno, come to think of it... maybe you can get close that way... But I don't think the pixel edges will be "hard" the way you want them. The font system will still try to anti-alias it, which was the point of the shader hack above.