Making text more readable

Unity Engine
1

I’m struggling with getting a nice font to be readable at small sizes, like the size of the text on this webpage. When I scale any text down, parts of the letters break up or blur unevenly. As far as I can tell, there are a few variables:

  1. Size of the font when imported
  2. (if a TextMesh) Character size in the inspector
  3. Transform scaling
  4. Anisotropic filtering on the font texture
  5. Antialiasing during import

Some work better than others for making characters more readable, like changing character size on a TextMesh seems to work better than just scaling its transform. No matter what, though, text kind of ‘breaks down’ when it gets small, especially if it’s got a large texture (1024+).

Are any of you working on games that need to render paragraphs of text or small labels, etc? How do you do it?

2

What font are you using? I’ve got DinSchrift (a nice clean European san serif often used on highway signs) down quite small and still legible. San serif for small lettering is the way to go IMHO.

3

Is it fixed-width by any chance? I seem to get better results with my Courier than the sans serif I’m using (called BetaSans). I guess it could be down to the font.

4

Ew, no! :wink: Fixed width. (The professional typographer in me shudders.) If BetaSans is free send me a linkie and I’ll have a look.

5

Hehe. I didn’t mean to offend your sensibilities. :wink:

Unfortunately the font is not free. I don’t know if it will do any good, but here’s the company’s preview page. Do you think maybe the lines are too thin or something?

Here is a series of what the font looks like (imported at 72pt) as I scale it up:

39060--1451--$picture_4_171.png
39060--1452--$picture_3_773.png
39060--1453--$picture_6_108.png

6

I’m looking for one very very close (I have a fully legal collection of about 2900 fonts) and will send it along when I find one.

7

That would be well beyond any conventional expectation. You’re the best.

8

Oh? :slight_smile: If you zip that up, I’d be happy to host the download for everyone to grab. Heh.

9

The closest two I’ve been able to find are Emigre’s Triplex and Platelet, shown here …

The nice thing is that there are Truetype freeware fonts that are almost identical to the real ones available on a number of free font sites.

Let me know if one of those would do and I’ll find a freeware lookalike for you.

10

If it doesn’t break up that badly at small sizes, a Platelet look-alike could work real well. The game is sci-fi-y, so if you have to choose between a couple, lean in that direction. :wink:

Thanks for your help. Any idea what is it about these fonts that make them more suitable for scaling?

11

I’ll find a Platelet look-alike tonight and post a screen shot from a empty Unity project. I’ll then send you along a TTF. I want to see what they look like at a smaller size.

They have a standard width on the strokes. They have nice open bowls and open areas that help small edges get defined better. Nicely kerned (between the letters). Extremely smooth. A lot of reasons but we’ll see later.