New UI Text feature request (kerning)

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

I’ve been exploring the new UI and text features and its nice to see that a relatively new update included the ability to adjust the line spacing. I was wondering if I could request the ability to kern?

Alternatively, could someone help me… I’m experiencing an issue with the kerning on a font between two lowercase letters “l” and “i”, in illustrator the kerning appears to be as expected, so it looks like the font has correct kerning pairs set up for these letters correctly, however, in unity it seems to ignore this and set it incorrectly. I was wondering if this is connected to the version of FreeType that unity uses to handle fonts, because as I understand it FreeType has only recently supported the HarfBuzz library which should enable the gpos table to be accessed?

I might be wrong and jumping to conclusions but if anyone could shed any light on this, or an alternative free solution to my problem I would be grateful.

Many thanks

Rich

2 Likes
2

Hey,

I am having the same problem. I’m using the Segoe UI font which is native to Windows Phone apps. But the kerning in Unity is terrible. This issue persists in the Windows Phone 8 build.

Photoshop:

Unity4.6:

It would be really helpful to know if there is a fix or workaround for this. Also it is unclear to me if it is possible to use bitmapped fonts and Atalsses in uGUI.

Thanks,
Mark

1 Like
3

Currently the kerning size come from the data in the provided font asset. We will be looking at expanding this support when we modify font rendering at a later stage.

2 Likes
4

If you need support for kerning, I suggest you take a look at Text Mesh Pro. The asset store version doesn’t include support for Unity 4.6 yet but the author has made the latest beta which does include support for Unity 4.6 available to registered users on the Text Mesh Pro user forum.

5

+1 for kerning, and maybe also the ability to “narrow” a font - sure would be handy.

6

Until Unity has a chance to add support for kerning, you can take a look at TextMesh Pro

Kerning and Character Spacing are both kind of standard things which don’t alter the design of the font.

Dilation which TextMesh Pro also does in addition to Kerning and Character Spacing control will allow you to enlarge or shrink a font while maintaining the proportionality of the font and keep it close to the design.

However, to make a font narrower, you can always use X Scale but that isn’t really advisable as it will deform (stretch / squash) the characters / font.

7

I think typographic controls on a character and paragraph level would be a huge lift (if not necessary).

8

We released an asset to solve this for Unity UI, it inherits from the Text element creating a new element called KernedText: Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

9

Just FYI for ledding, you have this …

perfect!