UniText - Text Engine for Unity

Text Engine

• Unicode 18.0, passing every official conformance test for bidirectional text, line breaking, grapheme clusters and word boundaries — 884,091 cases.

• HarfBuzz shaping, as in Chrome, Firefox and Android; full bidirectional algorithm (UAX #9); every Unicode script.

• Dictionary-based word breaking for Thai, Lao, Khmer and Myanmar.

• SDF and MSDF glyphs generated from font outlines in Burst jobs into a shared Texture2DArray with adaptive tiles, reference counting and LRU eviction. No atlas assets.

• System Font: any character the OS supports, with no font file in the project; also the automatic fallback under your fonts. Not available on WebGL.

• Font families with CSS weight matching; variable fonts (wght, wdth, ital, slnt, opsz) controllable per range.

• Native color emoji: ZWJ sequences, skin tones, flags; emoji or text presentation follows Unicode.

• Zstd font compression (~2.7×); font memory mapping reads large fonts from disk on demand.

• Pixel fonts on the font's own grid, bitmap-only fonts included.

• LaTeX math: formulas, numbered equations, matrices, mhchem chemistry.

• Virtualized documents: only blocks near the viewport are laid out.

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Styles & Animation

• One paint model — solid, gradient or texture — for fill, stroke, shadow, inner shadow and glow; optional dithering against gradient banding.

• Unlimited layers per range, each with its own blend mode; linear, radial and angular gradients projected per glyph, range, line or block.

• Underline and strikethrough as real geometry with CSS line styles.

• Rounded range highlights.

• Text along arcs and curves; auto-size can tighten letter spacing, glyph width or line height before shrinking the font.

• 13 kinetic modifiers, deterministic in both directions of time.

• Typewriter reveal with 19 composable arrival effects, shared through catalog assets.

• Reactive effects: hover, press, focus or a custom signal drive any modifier property, with easing.

• Interactive ranges: links, spoilers, trigger words, gestures, serialized actions, typed events.

• Inline objects and sprites take part in layout, line breaking and selection.

• Custom shader effects compile for Canvas, world space, Built-in and URP from one source.

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Editing & Input

• Selection and an editable document model for Canvas and world-space text, with undo and redo.

• OS key, text, IME and keyboard-visibility events independent of Unity's input system.

• IME composition styled per clause; filters never see uncommitted text.

• Correct caret placement at soft wraps and bidirectional boundaries.

• Touch selection handles and magnifier; context menu built from your scene UI.

• Behaviors: password, length limit, input mask, case transform, single-line submit, select all on focus, keyboard avoidance, restore on cancel, link on paste, strip formatting on paste, native field overlay.

• Filters: integer, decimal, email, alphanumeric, name; custom validators plug in separately.

• Decorators: placeholder, floating label, supporting text, character counter.

• Soft-keyboard traits mapped across iOS, Android and Web.

• Clipboard: native lossless format, HTML, Markdown, plain text.

• Dropdown with UniText captions and an option list built from prefab templates.

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Performance

• Rebuilding 100 multilingual text objects (Galaxy S21 FE, IL2CPP release): UniText 69 ms, UI Toolkit 167 ms, TextMeshPro 455 ms.

• Incremental edit in the same scene: 43 ms; unchanged paragraphs are not re-analyzed or re-shaped.

• Decorative-font atlas fill (609 glyphs): UniText 96 ms, UI Toolkit 826 ms, TextMeshPro 2,025 ms.

• Cold multilingual atlas fill (3,029 glyphs), main-thread cost: UniText ≈33 ms (dispatch only), UI Toolkit 6,446 ms and TextMeshPro 8,635 ms (both synchronous).

• TextMeshPro does not shape Arabic or apply the bidirectional algorithm, so its output is not equivalent: it does less work and still takes longer.

• Parallel Burst Unicode analysis: 92 ms vs 351 ms single-threaded on a 12-core desktop.

• Optional merged glyph layers: text with a stroke and a shadow takes about 40% less GPU time on a mid-range Android phone.

• Zero GC allocations at runtime.

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Tools

• Editor: style presets, font family inspector, glyph picker with live preview, atlas preview, font subsetter, word-dictionary builder.

• TextMeshPro migration workspace: scans the project and converts scenes, prefabs and scripts batch by batch.

• Full C# API; modifiers, parse rules, input behaviors and decorators are extensible.

• Unity Localization integration.

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3D Text (UniText 3D module)

• Extruded glyph solids with front and back bevels (eight profiles or a custom curve) and a material per surface.

• Physically based shader for URP and Built-in, Shader Graph for HDRP; reusable look assets.

• Solid layers: outlines, rims, plates, stencils, engraving, neon tubes; depth, bevel and material per range.

• Deformers: bend, twist, taper, wave, sphere, spline path.

• Motion in depth and 3D reveal effects; emoji as flat images or extruded stickers.

• Prefabs on glyphs, scene fields, synced colliders, shattering, surface points that follow their glyph.

• Solids built once and shared, on worker threads or baked ahead; export to a mesh, an LOD group, OBJ or FBX.

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Supported Platforms

• Windows — x64, ARM64

• UWP — x64, ARM64

• macOS — x64, Apple Silicon

• Linux — x64, ARM64

• Android — ARMv7, ARM64, x86, x64

• iOS, tvOS, visionOS — ARM64

• WebGL 2.0

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Requirements

• Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer

• Burst 1.8.29+ and Unity.Mathematics 1.2.6+

• LightSide Core (free, MIT)

Dependencies are installed automatically.

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Notes

• UniText is a standalone engine with its own components, shaders and font assets; it does not need TextMeshPro or UI Toolkit.

• WebGL has no System Font: ship at least one font file for that platform.

• Spline paths in UniText 3D need the Splines package 2.0+; FBX export needs the FBX Exporter package.