Rich Text Quad Problem

I would like to use rich text "quad" tag to insert some icons into my strings. To use it I need to set a material. I'm new to Unity and never used materials before. It seems that materials are set per renderer, but there are multiple renderers for different UI elements. Should I add that material to my Text renderer or to my Canvas renderer? Does material counting start from 0 or from 1? I'm doing everything through scripts.

 

per most array/list structures, it starts at 0

 

To bad that "quad" tag is supported only for Text Mesh which can't be placed directly on Canvas. :/

 

I want to use this feature too.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StyledText.html
On this page there is an example:
<quad material=1 size=20 x=0.1 y=0.1 width=0.5 height=0.5 />

What is this "material"?

 

Five years later it looks like this still isn't answered. I've tried all kinds of combos and only TMP seems to do this. Question: Why is it still in the documentation for Unity's standard StyledText?

 

5 years later I'm still unable to figure out how to add the material. You clearly did not need the question "what is this material" answered if you were at least able to do it with TMP. Question is how do you do it even with TMP?

When I try "<quad material=1 size=20 x=0.1 y=0.1 width=0.5 height=0.5>" it just renders the literal text.

Is it because I am missing the "material" and if so where do I add these "material"?

EDIT: In case anyone's still wondering, I think I ended up using sprites and sprite atlas instead.