Hello! Happy to say that UI Toolkit now has full Right-to-Left (RTL) Language support, in Unity 6.0!
This is part of a significant rewrite of our text back end to rebase ourselves on top of industry-standard open-source libraries (Harfbuzz and ICU) that the rest of the industry has been using for some time.
We’re introducing this new backend as the Advanced Text Generator (ATG), currently available as an opt-in feature in Unity 6.0, and set to become the default in future releases. ATG already achieves core parity with TextCore (our current text backend), supporting full editing, selection, navigation, font fallbacks, and key rich text tags like <link>
, <a>
, <b>
, <i>
, <u>
, <s>
, <color>
, and more. For the latest details, check out the documentation.
If you’re curious what this means and how it works in U6, here’s a brief overview: UI Toolkit: Right-to-Left (RTL) Language Support in Unity 6.0
We hope you’ll give it a go and look forward to your feedback!
If you’re curious about why we’re introducing a new Text backend, read on.
Unity currently maintains multiple text backends: TextCore, TextMesh Pro, and the Legacy Text System. All rely on the Freetype open-source library for glyph rasterization, but each has custom implementations for standards like Unicode and OpenType.
To illustrate the scale of this challenge, the Unicode Standard (v15) spans 1060 pages, while the OpenType specification has been continuously evolving since the ‘90s and covers everything from glyph positioning to advanced typographic features. The complexity and constant evolution of these standards make it unrealistic for Unity to maintain in-house implementations.
Recognizing this, we decided to develop a Text backend based on open-source standards and libraries. ATG leverages Harfbuzz for text shaping and ICU for advanced Unicode support. This shift allows us to quickly provide better handling of complex scripts and languages, including right-to-left (RTL) languages like Arabic and Hebrew. For further insights on the current open-source text ecosystem, I recommend State of Text Rendering 2024.