Why is there “Editor Text Sharpness” slider that we’re supposed to try and manually tweak now? No value makes it look good, and text in different places of the editor are affected differently by it so it’s not possible to fix this by tweaking this slider anyway. A lot of the ugly new changes seem unrelated to text sharpness anyway. Like line heights are different, character widths (kerning?) are different, some characters are actually lumpy with uneven thickness.
Just compare Unity 2022 or earlier with Unity 2023. It looks like crap. Why was this changed? How is it possible to release this?
Oh god, there’s reason why pixel perfect font rendering is used for most cases.
Aligning characters on subpixel offsets just looks like shit. No amount of “text sharpness” is going to fix that.
This is not iPhone with 460 Pixels per inch. These are PC displays with ~100 PPI and small text - to fit a lot of data on the screen.
For the love of god, bring back the original text rendering please. Or at least add a switch.
I don’t understand why we have to deal with such bullshit.
It’s clearly visible how horrible it looks when you compare Unity rendered text with text in the main menu (File, Edit, Assets, etc…). Most windows apps use pixel-perfect text rendering, why this has to be different?
I actually reverted back to 2022 due to this. There was no way to fix this in my end and I thought it looked so bad it reduced my enjoyment from using the editor by a lot.
I could show screenshots and create bug reports for this, but I’m hoping someone else feels more like spending their own time being a tester for Unity than I do at the moment. I assume there are more people than just me who uses Unity on Windows with light mode. You’d think that was something they tested internally as well before doing releases. And I’m only limiting my report to that particular combination because I didn’t test this with any other combinations of appearance and operating system. For all I know it could be broken in all of them.
Yep, me too, just reverted back to 2022.
Unusable, can’t look at blurry or oversharpen texts whole day.
It’s unlikely this is just light skin issue. I think it might be smaller issue on Mac, which has higher pixel density (up to 220 for professional displays).
My report got dismissed pretty quickly with advices from bag “have you tried restarting you computer”.
I’m pretty pissed wasting my time like this, won’t be reporting more issues any time soon.
Don’t the development teams test their releases on full HD monitors? This blurry editor text is awful. For a professional software product like Unity the blurry mess of the editor text is completely unacceptable. Unity editor UI appearance has never been great, but in previous version’s it’s been acceptable. In 2023 it’s completely unacceptable. I develop Unity courses and I can’t record the editor for tutorials while it’s in this state. This is a major issue and requires addressing immediately… not put to the bottom of the bug fix pile. Can you tell me and the other many Unity developers when this will be fixed??
Hi! My team is responsible for text and I was the one that decided to close this bug with the given explanation. That explanation still holds, however, after further discussion internally (your collective response also helped), I decided to re-open the bug.
For those interested, here’s a bit more context on this…old issue. The main reason text got a bit blurrier on low-dpi monitors is that we switched from hinted fonts to SDF fonts. Hinted fonts have “strong opinions” on each pixel of a character and can better approximate small characters on low-dpi screens. SDF fonts are more procedural in nature and will generate the pixels on the fly which means they are better at covering many different characters at many different sizes and resolutions.
We needed SDF fonts for high-dpi screens in general, but also for tools like ShaderGraph where users zoom text in/out all the time and hinted fonts simply can’t keep up. We used to have a very complex system to re-evaluate hinted fonts as you zoomed but it was very messy and also looked terrible. SDF fonts solved this, at the cost of low-dpi small fonts.
What we tried as part of this “bug fix” is to create a system that would be able to switch in real time between hinted fonts and SDF fonts. We tried to go for best-of-both-worlds. However, as I said in the bug resolution comment, this turned out to be far more complex and risky than anticipated. We DO want to properly fix this in a future version of Unity, but we need more time to clean house before we try again.
That said, what we could try a more opt-in, optional, approach, similar to the existing Text Sharpness setting. We can let you choose to change the Editor to hinted fonts for yourself. It won’t be perfect but we hope it will be still an improvement over the current situation. This is why I re-opened the bug. We’ll have more details in the bug resolution when we get there.
I wanted to end with an emphasis that this was not a simple Won’t Fix in order to improve our dashboards. The team worked on this issue full-time for months before coming to this conclusion. We’re also unhappy about this outcome.
Since most game developers are also gamers, here are some steam survy, just for reference, in case someone stayed in their tower of ivory for too long:
This problem really should not happen in the first place.
It’s not “a bit blurrier”, I was forced to use 2023.1 for almost a month, and my eyesight dropped, for real. It hurts me physically! So I requested a position change, and my eyes slowly recovers a few months later.
For me, it’s not possible to change the monitor. There are rules and regulations inplace.
(I noticed in many videos that a lot Unity devs uses Macs. Maybe that’s why this decision was made)
About a month ago I discovered the sharpness setting in 2023.2, then I started use it (with a setting of 0.5). For now, my eyesight stays.
Didn’t know if this setting exist in 2023.1, didn’t notice, and no one tells me anything.
For UIs that can zoom in/out, like shader graph, uses SDF.
For fixed font size UI, like the main editor window, uses hinted font.
I don’t think this is someting outrageous to ask.
I’m going to keep watching, for how many years it going to take to fix this problem. And hope my eyesight are still good by then.
It would have been nice to have made SDF optional in the first place, and leave the old behavior as standard, but making the old behavior optional in preferences would work well for me, I’m using a relatively low 100 PPI monitor Apple 30” Cinemadisplay, and I prefer the old rendering of 2022. So if this can be brought back as a user setting I would really be happy! Thank you
Uh. Did you get many complaints about that? Personally, I have not ever felt any problem with zooming in unity graphs. It looks fine in 2022.3 honestly
It’s good this time somebody actually cared enough to reopen that bug, thank you.
That said, just switching to SDF fonts because you, once again, wanted “one codepath” seems like a worrying trend among Editor UX team.
Unity talks a lot about how they went through “restart”, so maybe have a talk in your team and understand that you not wanting to maintain your codebase should never be the reason for users to get worse product no matter how insignificant the downside you think it is. Although maybe you already had that kind of talk which is why bug was reopened
