TextMesh Pro Version 1.4.1-Preview 1 with Dynamic SDF for Unity 2018.3 now available!

Hello Stephan_B, when I did this, I got the following error:


C:/Your/Project/Folder//2D Projects/Game - Copy/Library/PackageCache/com.unity.textmeshpro@1.4.0/Scripts/Runtime/TMP_InputField.cs(1682,152): error CS1644: Feature `out variable declaration' cannot be used because it is not part of the C# 4.0 language specification

Do you have any idea of what it could be?

 

I'm using dynamic fonts as a fallback for any characters that aren't in our localized text.

When we're working in the editor, we often put sample text into our text fields to test layouts. Sometimes this includes characters that aren't part of our localized text, so those get dynamically rendered into our dynamic fallbacks. Great! We can test that just the way it would work at runtime!

Unfortunately, Unity saves out the dynamic font atlas, and now there are a bunch of characters we don't intend to use taking up space in our dynamic atlas. This confuses people when they see it in source control, and they aren't sure if they should check in these changes to fonts or not. (There's also some slim legal risk of unknowingly shipping an ESRB rating or trademark violation in our game assets.)

It would be really great if dynamic fonts didn't actually save their changes when running in the editor. Or at least have an option to disable that for specific font assets. I really only want to be writing to them at runtime.

 

I've had to reset them a few times after they got checked in by someone else. I tried to use the Reset like you did in the video, but it doesn't work for me. I've been using the... I forget the label, it's something like "Regenerate Character Atlas" button or whatever that's in the inspector. Then I delete the characters there and regenerate. Same result, it's just a few more clicks.

Even with these little bumps, the dynamic fonts are great! They're a huge save for us. All our fonts have dynamic fallbacks now. It would be cool if there was a button you could click in a font that makes a dynamic fallback and hooks it up with compatible settings to the font you're looking at. Thanks for making the dynamic generation work just in time for our project!

 

I am having the same problem after updating to 2019.1. How exactly did you resolve it?
I have tried deleting the cache folders, doing a "git clean -dfx" and removing and re-adding TMP from the package manager. But the error is still there.

 

Thx this worked for me

 

I'm pretty sure I don't have any text objects in my test scene, they're all generated from prefabs spawned at runtime, but I will keep an eye on this and see if I can get you anymore clues.

Nice, if this becomes more of a hassle later on, I'll write some utility to clear them out when an asset saves or something.

This sounds even better!

 

What should we do if we get a spam of:
The character used for Ellipsis is not available in font asset
?
(I'm asking if we should regenerate it or something, if yes then what should we change?)

 

Hello Stephan, when I use <nobr></nobr> tag in TMPUGUI Component for disable auto line breaking feature, it still break if there are space in text.Can I disable auto line breaking completely?Please tell me how to do,thank you very much!

 

Is there any written documentation about how to use the new Dynamic SDF features?

It's not clear where even to start. If I go to Window > Text Mesh Pro > Font Asset Creator, there doesn't seem to be any options for dynamic SDF.

If I select a TMP font asset I've previously created, I can see that there is an "Atlas Population Mode" field set to "static". However, when I try to change this to "dynamic", it doesn't change (the value remains "static").

 

Thanks for the reply.

Videos are not a good substitute for written documentation. You can't search a video for a keyword. You can't copy a particular passage from the video into your own files for reference. You have to watch the video in an environment where it's possible to hear the sound (and are totally out of luck if you're deaf). Even if you aren't done with the full documentation, a few more paragraphs in the initial post would go a long way.

It turns out the source font file character mode was set to "Unicode" instead of dynamic. I missed the debug log warning because I almost always have to have the "warnings" level turned off, since Unity has traditionally spammed hundreds of irrelevant compiler warnings when opening or running a large project (e.g. 'field is never initialized' warnings for serialized fields which are actually assigned values in the inspector rather than in code). Although now that I'm paying attention, it looks like I'm not getting all of those compiler warnings in 2018.3.12f1, so maybe they fixed that.

 

You don't mention in the FAQ how atlas size is handled for dynamic fonts. Say that we have a dynamic font with a 2048x2048 atlas. At runtime, the atlas fills up with CJK characters. Is the atlas automatically expanded to accommodate additional characters, or will new characters stop being added?

 

Okay, thanks for the information!

It's a bit off-topic, but it would be very great if you could convince the other staff at Unity to make TMP text components share a common base class or interface with Unity's built-in text components. It is an annoying hassle having to go through each component script and change UnityEngine.UI.Text to TMP_Text when converting an existing project to TMP.

At the very least, all of the text classes could share some interface like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. public interface IText {
2.     string Text { get; set }
3. }

Even though interface fields can't be assigned in the Inspector, it would make life easier when converting a project to TMP or building a project that mixes TMP and legacy text.

 

We still haven't upgraded to TMP version 1.4 but our company is planning to do so. One thing I'd like to know, what is the best way to seamlessly handle emoji country flags such as US Flag Emoji, at the moment in version 1.3 we're having trouble handling it. Since these flags seem to contain 2 UTF32 characters, TextMesh pro will just render them as Letter symbols such as U and S. Can version 1.4 handle this issue better? And if possible, can you help us in finding a solution to do it in version 1.3?

Appreciate your reply Stephan

 

TryAddCharacters still seems to always throw NullReferenceException in the latest preview. [Edit] Ah, it seems to work if you only create the font asset in run-time.

Also, is TryAddCharacters only to be used on dynamic font assets or would it be possible use this to add characters to static font assets via editor scripting?

 

I created a dynamic font asset in editor and then tried to add characters to it on runtime with TryAddCharacters. That threw the exception.

Trying to find a way to make an editor script to generate the font assets automatically. Version 1.3.0 seemed to have
TMPro_FontPlugin.Render_Characters but is that not available anymore in 1.4.0?

 

Hi @Stephan_B

I still get the same error:

Code (CSharp):

1. Library/PackageCache/com.unity.textmeshpro@2.0.1-preview.1/Scripts/Editor/TMP_SettingsEditor.cs(332,91): error CS0407: 'Object TMP_ResourceImporterProvider.GetTMPSettings()' has the wrong return type
2.  

I'm using:

* Unity 2019.1.0f2
* TextMesh Pro 2.0.1-preview.1



I've re-imported the essentials (or deleted them in another test), and I reimported everything within Unity (t.b.h. I used

git clean -xdf

to remove anything related to caches etc.).

However, I've found the following behavior: When re-importing everything, it works. If I switch to iOS platform then the error occurs and stays even when switching back to Desktop platform.

 

Apparently, works fine on new projects. I'll try to investigate.

There is no way to generate font assets via editor script in 1.4 yet? That would be really useful to keep font assets up date with the localization files.

 

In an existing project that was upgraded from 1.3, when a new dynamic font asset is created Sampling Point Size defaults to zero, along with all the other settings under Face Info. Also, every time Sampling Point Size is changed and Apply is pressed it is set to zero instead. New projects do not have this problem. I have tried removing TMP Settings. Is there anything else I could try to reset to get around this problem?

[Edit] To answer my own question: Incl. Font Data needs to be enabled in Font settings

 

There seems to be some performance impact in attempting to add a character to a dynamic font asset that doesn't actually exist in the source font. This could become an issue when we have lots of user text input by the users, as some user may figure out the delay problem and spam the chat with non-existing characters. We'll implement client-side stripping of these characters for now. I have attached a sample project to demonstrate the issue. There pressing a button to display a mockup chat takes several seconds to process. The delay seems to be multiplied by the use of layout groups.

A couple of other small things:
- The sample project includes another scene to demonstrate the issue I had earlier. I figured you need clear the font asset before you can call TryAddCharacters.
- Trying to create dynamic font asset in a new project before TMP Importer is run throws an exception.

Note: I had to remove TextMeshPro from the zip to get around the file size limit.

 

Thank you!

Also getting these exceptions when attempting to use emojis from two different texture atlases. Not sure how much it is related to that but I have attached another sample project that should be able reproduce it. As I had to remove TextMeshPro from the archive again, you also need to setup the Default Sprite Asset to "emoji-base-sheet" in the TextMeshPro settings. Then pressing the button should trigger these exceptions.

 

Reported some other issues I run into via the bug reporter: case id 1152711

 

Attached a screenshot. Happened to some text components. You can kind of fix it by changing the alignment to center and then back to left. There should be a sample scene included for that case also.

 

I also have the issue of Unity becoming unresponsive with 1.4.0.

It does a couple of font upgrades quickly, then as soon as I open our mainmenu, Unity becomes unresponsive and stays that way.

The console becomes frozen as well, but in the editor log I can see the following:

Code (csharp):

1. Updating Assets/Fonts/latin_new.asset - GUID: a65babff9c620124c9166c07dbc83377...
2.  done. [Time: 78.510022 ms]

And then this 5 times (I left only the relevant parts)/

Code (csharp):

1. Assertion failed on expression: 'HasValidGameObject(liveObject)'
2. UnityEditor.AssetDatabase:SaveAssets()
3. TMPro.TMP_FontAsset:UpgradeFontAsset() (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.textmeshpro@1.4.0/Scripts/Runtime/TMP_FontAsset.cs:1853)
4. TMPro.TMP_FontAsset:Awake() (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.textmeshpro@1.4.0/Scripts/Runtime/TMP_FontAsset.cs:482)
5. (...)
6. [/Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Misc/GarbageCollectSharedAssets.cpp line 815]
7. (Filename: Library/PackageCache/com.unity.textmeshpro@1.4.0/Scripts/Runtime/TMP_FontAsset.cs Line: 1853)

Should note: I'm on latest 2018.3 and on a Mac.

 

Also how can I make it stop spamming me?

I don't want Underline and Strikethrough, or ellipsis, and I don't use them, this font only has numbers, why is it spamming me?

 

Cool, 1.4.1 did not make the editor freeze, but now I have another (less major) issue.

The generation settings seem to be different than the actual settings.

see:



So weirdly, they have things like different render modes, which is kinda weird and not a deal breaker.

The problematic part is that the "Generation Settings" are always missing the Source Font File, which made me mistakenly obliterate a bunch of fonts (making a change and hit apply messes up the font, the atlas is still there, the character sequence is gone though and the font disappears from the scene)

 

Okay, but maybe if the source font asset is missing, maybe don't allow me to change any settings? I went to change the padding, hit apply, the altas didn't change but all other data was gone.

I'm pming you a link to a font asset. All the fonts in my project seem to exhibit this behaviour, but I tested a few on a new project and they do it there too.

 

When you have TMP_InputField with Content Type set to Custom, the mobile keyboard won't show up on Android nor iOS.

 

I see! In 1.3 it used to bring up the mobile keyboard, and that's why I noticed it. I don't think we had any real reason to use custom, since the predefined options seem to do the same.