TextMesh Pro Version 1.5.1, 2.1.1 & 3.0.1 - Now Available! for Testing!

Link to the previous sticky post with introduction video on Dynamic SDF.

The preview release (beta) of the TMP package version 1.5.0 for Unity 2018.4 and version 2.1.0 for Unity 2019.x are now available for testing via the Package Manager.

These are identical releases in terms of functionality but had to be separate releases due to changes in Unity such as dependency on the UI package in 2019.x, etc.

These two packages include updated TMP Essential Resources and TMP Examples & Extras. Updating these is optional.

There are two new major features in this release, Text Styles and Multi Atlas Texture support which I will cover below as well as several minor features and lots of fixes. See the ChangeLog for more details.


Text Styles
Text Styles allow the application of a style to a text object. This is very useful when a specific style applies to the whole object which previously required using the <style> tag at the start and end of the body of the text which was not ideal in some cases and also error prone.



The Text Style pull down shows the Text Styles available. Text Styles are defined Globally in the TMP Settings Default StyleSheet and can now also be Local by assigning a StyleSheet in the Extra Settings of the text object. If a style is defined in the local and global StyleSheets, the local style will override the global style.

It is possible to use a Text Style and styles in the body of the text. Nesting of styles has also been improved.

Multi Atlas Texture
The Multi Atlas Texture feature enables font assets to create new atlas textures as needed which is when it is no longer possible to add new glyphs to the main atlas. These additional atlas textures inherit the settings of the main atlas texture which are defined in the font asset Generation Settings. All atlas textures including the main atlas are contained in an array of Texture2D. The main is always index [0].



Changes to the font assets including the addition of new atlas texture are persistent in the editor but not persistent in builds. As such and for example, a dynamic font asset with multi atlas support enabled will be able to grow / add as many atlas textures as needed to handle the glyph coverage in a given play session but will always default back to its initial state for the next session.



Since changes to font assets are persistent in the Editor, it is also possible to Reset font assets via the Context Menu option Reset. This will clear the Glyph, Character and Glyph Adjustment Tables. This will also clear all atlas textures.

Changing generation settings (in the Editor) like atlas texture size, will automatically regenerate and re-pack the existing glyphs and adjust the number of atlas textures as needed based on the new settings. This makes easy and convenient to later optimize your font asset and atlases in the event you discover the initial settings were incorrect.

This Multi Atlas Texture feature applies to all dynamic font assets whether they are assigned as primary or fallback somewhere.

As mentioned above, these atlas textures are contained in an array and in this first implementation will result in a draw call for each atlas texture. However, I am planning on updating the shaders to add support for texture arrays where on devices that support this feature (which is most fairly recent mobile devices), these will now only take a single draw call.

Multi Atlas Texture support is an important new feature that will require additional robust testing. No doubt we'll uncover potential issues and / or API functionality that should be added to make the feature even more robust / flexible. I look forward to your feedback on this new feature and release of course.

Additional Important Changes
(1) In this release, I reworked the line breaking / word wrapping handling to address limitations related to glyph insertion when used in conjunction with Text Auto Size which required recursion. The catalyst for this was an issue with Soft Hyphenation used in combination with Text Auto Size.

As part of this refactor, I also improved the handling of Text Overflow modes like Truncate, Ellipsis, Linked and Page mode to also remove the use of recursion. This also improves the layout / performance when using these modes.

Although I have done a lot of testing related to these changes, no doubt we'll run into some cases where we get incorrect layout results. Let me know if you notice any issues when using these modes or overall text layout.

(2) Additional tweaks were done to character, line, paragraph spacing which now represent 1/100 em. This affect tag using (em) and those values in the inspector. Simply put the (em) handling was incorrect in previous versions. Some of those changes were present in 1.4.1 so let me know if you run into any issues here.

(3) Alignment properties have now been split into horizontalAlignment and verticalAlignment. This will provide for independent control over these which was a requested feature when working with Prefabs as changes to alignment in the past would always dirty everything. This should be a workflow improvement. In theory (again) you should not notice any changes here. There was an issue with alignment in 1.4.1 which affected users with project initially created back in the Unity 5.4 ish time frame. These alignment issues should be handled automatically now.

(4) Added support for modern line breaking for Korean where spaces are used. This option is in the TMP Settings.

Again please review the ChangeLog as it contains lots of stuff including reference to some new smaller new features.

This release is missing some new features that I plan to add in the next preview release or so. These are in no particular order: <HR> tag, Initial implementation of the TMP Resource Manager to make it easier to work with Asset Bundles and Addressables and any type of custom loading of resources. Support for manual definition of diacritical marks (Mark to Base and Mark to Mark). Improve handling of super large text objects where the geometry is larger than 65,535 vertices. This currently works but I uncovered some issues that I want to address. Adding iTextProcessor interface to improved pre-processing / shaping of the text. Additional line breaking / work separators discussed in forum posts. And more small type features that I have discussed on the forum that I would like to get in version 1.5.0 and 2.1.0.

Lastly, it took too long to get this release out so I want to work on reducing the interval between releases.

Feedback
If you run into any unforeseen issues or have questions about these releases, feel free to reply to this post.


How to Install
These latest preview release are available via the package manager only. To install these, open the Package Manager UI and select the appropriate package as shown below.

In Unity 2018.4


In Unity 2019.x

 

See the following post about the different modes. SDFAA is the equivalent of Smooth whereas SDFAA Hinted computes the SDF using the Hinted version of the glyph.

I suspect your initial issue was due to the ratio of Sampling Point Size to Padding being too small. This ratio determines the effective range of the material properties. See FAQ Question 11. You normally want a ratio of about 10% so if the sampling point size was 500, you would have needed a padding value of 50 which is huge. Most fonts will render nicely at around 72 - 100 points and most Asian fonts due to how they are structured actually do pretty good at 36 to 48.

 

Waiting on the documentation team.

The ChangeLog is contained in the package (assuming you have installed the latest release). I have also attached just the relevant changes for these releases.

 

I'll take a look this afternoon and provide feedback thereafter.

 

Can you provide me with some simple test setup that mirrors what you have?

 

There are definite issues related to Clipping / Culling in the preview 1 which I have been looking into. I do have a current solution which I am further testing. I expect to release a new preview within the next few days.

This should resolve all issues related to Clipping and Culling including the null reference on RectMask2D.

 

Can you provide me with the texture and TexturePackager .json file to look at?

Same as above.

This should work in 2018.4.7 or newer. This is a known issue on iOS which I need to address.

 

Thank you for providing the zip file. I'll take a look at 1 & 2.

In terms of 3, TMP does not arbitrarily grab characters from system fonts. This is by design as fonts can vary greatly from one to the other in terms of visual design and metrics. I believe that developers and designers should select the appropriate fonts for the languages their project targets. This ensures, the selected font(s) support the needed characters and also work well from a design point of view.

TMP does allow you to create font assets at runtime from system fonts but you have to specify the source font file.

Just to provide more details on this... Let's say your project uses Arial and you then type a Korean character. Given there are several fonts available on Windows that include Korean characters, does TMP pick the first font by alphabetical order? How do we know this font works well with Arial? Then what do we do on Android or iOS or PS4, Switch which all include different system fonts.

Like I said given fonts can vary greatly in terms of design, I think it is important for developer and designer to carefully select the fonts they want to use and not leave it to some semi random font selection.

 

No ETA yet but most likely at some point in the 2020 cycle.

 

When it is no longer possible to add a glyph to an atlas texture, TMP does like before and looks for a potential fallback.

In terms of the Multi Atlas feature, when it is no longer possible to add a glyph to the current atlas, a new atlas texture is created with the same Generation Setting to which the glyph is added. In terms of memory, it is the whatever the new texture requires which is identical to the previous atlas texture since they use the same settings.

There is not as this has additional performance overhead and can lead to lots of issues.

The Dynamic System in TMP combined with Multi Atlas feature and fallback system can easily handle this use case.

Please note that newly created dynamic font assets have their atlas texture size at 0 until the first glyph is added. As such, they take little space in a build and little memory overhead until the first glyph needs to be added at which point they are re-sized from Zero to their defined size in the Generation Settings.

It is important to understand that changes to font asset in the Editor are persistent but not at runtime. These means these font assets and atlas texture are reset to their default state at the start of every play session. As such, these font assets only need to handle whatever characters are needed in a single session. Should the need arise, there is also API function to reset font assets.

Latest preview release is now available, I suggest you give that a shot. Latest release for Unity 2018.4 is 1.5.0-preview.2 and 2.1.0-preview 2 for Unity 2019.x or newer.

 

Release 1.5.0-preview.2 for Unity 2018.4 is now available as well as release 2.1.0-preview.2 for Unity 2019.x or newer. See release notes for changes.

Please continue to provide feedback specific to these release in this thread and general feedback / questions in separate threads.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
As a result of adding support for setting culling mode in the material in the Debug Settings of the material inspector, users should update the TMP Essential Resources via the "Window - TextMeshPro - Import TMP Essential Resources" menu option to import the revised shaders.

 

I am not sure about this one. Can you please provide me with a repro scene / project for the above?

As per my important note just before your post, you need to import the latest TMP Essential Resources (the shaders namely which have a new property to provide control over culling).

 

This change to the TMP_SubMeshUI.cs and the equivalent change to TMP_SubMesh.cs should resolve #2

I'll take a look as soon as possible once you get me the repro project.

 

Reserved...

 

This is the entire code for that section. There is a specific check for m_sharedMaterial at line 688 so it should return before line 691.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. protected override void UpdateMaterial()
3. {
4.     //Debug.Log("*** STO-UI - UpdateMaterial() *** FRAME (" + Time.frameCount + ")");
5.     if (m_sharedMaterial == null)
6.         return;
7.     //if (canvasRenderer == null) m_canvasRenderer = this.canvasRenderer;
8.     // Special handling to keep the Culling of the material in sync with parent text object
9.     if (m_sharedMaterial.HasProperty(ShaderUtilities.ShaderTag_CullMode))
10.     {
11.         float cullMode = textComponent.fontSharedMaterial.GetFloat(ShaderUtilities.ShaderTag_CullMode);
12.         m_sharedMaterial.SetFloat(ShaderUtilities.ShaderTag_CullMode, cullMode);
13.     }
14.     canvasRenderer.materialCount = 1;
15.     canvasRenderer.SetMaterial(materialForRendering, 0);
16.     //m_canvasRenderer.SetTexture(mainTexture);
17.     #if UNITY_EDITOR
18.     if (m_sharedMaterial != null && gameObject.name != "TMP SubMeshUI [" + m_sharedMaterial.name + "]")
19.         gameObject.name = "TMP SubMeshUI [" + m_sharedMaterial.name + "]";
20.     #endif
21. }
22.  

Make sure you imported the revised Shaders contained the updated TMP Essential Resources. You can select to only import the shader folder.

Also make sure you made the changes in the global package cache otherwise the changes will be reset every time you restart Unity.

If the issue persists, I will need more information such as when is this happening? Can you produce it easily and can you provide me with a repro project / scene?

 

When was this happening? Ie. Just after enabling an object or just after instantiation?

Trying to figure out why fontSharedMaterial would be null in this case.

 

Would be great if you could submit a bug report with the included project and steps to reproduce the errors. There is no limit on the project size but if it is too big / becomes inconvenient, you can export those prefab with dependencies and provide those to me here or via private message on the forum. Bug report is always best with the full project. If you go this route, please provide me with the case # as soon as you get from Unity via automatic email reply.

Thank you for the kind words and you are most welcome

 

Pulling the bug files to see if it all made it through. Download is super slow right now (not sure why). I'll let you know once I have the file if everything checks out ok in terms of the download.

 

This should be resolved in Preview 3 but just to make sure, can you provide / export one of those scene from 1.4.1 just to make sure I didn't overlook anything?

 

Please make sure you upgrade to Preview 3 for the appropriate version of Unity and let me know if you still have that issue.

 

What version of Unity are you using?

 

What version of TMP were you using prior to upgrading to Preview 3?

Can you provide me with one of those prefabs that worked correctly in the previous version but has incorrect alignment in the latest release?

Update
I created several prefabs in 1.4.1 and then upgraded to Preview 3 and their alignments appears all fine. Since this appears to be working fine on my end, I will need a sample of your prefabs or the steps to reproduce them including Unity and TMP version used to create them.