TextMesh Pro: Using font weights with fallbacks

Unity Engine
1

We’re using two font weights for our project. The way we’ve set this up is:

Normal Regular Weight Font

  • Font weight 700 (Bold) = Normal Bold Weight Font

This has worked fine up until now, we just set the text we want to be bold as bold in the inspector, and everything works as expected.

We’re now localising into Chinese, and have created two separate fonts assets with the Chinese characters in using a different font. Fairly standard, I believe. One of these is bold, one is regular weight.

So, the way I expected this to work was that I would set these two new fonts as the fallbacks for the two original fonts.

Regular Weight Font

  • Font weight 700 (Bold) = Normal Bold Weight Font
  • Fallback = Chinese Regular Weight Font

Normal Bold Weight Font

  • Fallback = Chinese Bold Weight Font

This doesn’t work - TextMesh Pro ends up rendering non-Chinese characters with a faux-bold version of the bold font.

I tried setting the Chinese Bold Weight Font as a Bold weight for the Chinese Regular Weight Font but that doesn’t have any effect.

2

I’ve managed to work around this by setting the bold weight of the Chinese Bold Weight Font to itself. This seems to stop it applying the faux-bold effect to the font, but is quite an odd thing to have to do!