Hello! I’m trying to get the TextMeshPro text to look as crisp as standard text in Unity. Maybe I’m doing something wrong? Or such a result should be, as shown in the figure below.
Font Asset Creator options for the font used above:
For text displayed at small point size on screen, you can enable “Extra Padding” in the Extra Settings panel of the text component inspector.
Then on the Material inspector in the “debug section” of the material inspector, you can also tweak the sharpness slider (slightly) and this should allow you to make the text a bit sharper.
Having said that, you might be comparing text rendered in UI Text as bitmap hinted rastered vs. TMP using smooth which would render the same as bitmap hinted smooth.
As small point size hinted raster will always be sharper because it is pixel aligned but that comes at the cost of potential incorrect spacing between characters.
As small point size, hinted text tends to make all fonts look the same due to the pixel count limitations. By contrast, smooth maintains the design elements of the font but again at the cost of sharpness since anti aliasing is used.
According to a few published studies on text readability, incorrect character spacing was deemed a bigger offender over sharpness. This is one of the reasons why Apple almost a decade ago stopped using hinted text in favor of smooth. On low dpi devices, the text is blurrier but on higher dpi where there are enough pixels to properly anti alias the text, the text becomes as sharp.
@Stephan_B Thanks for the answer. I was afraid that I was doing something wrong, but judging by your answer, I did everything right. I just need to adjust some properties.
By the way, about Apple. I read that Microsoft and Apple have opposite approaches to text rendering. Microsoft believes text should be crisp at the expense of rendering accuracy. And at Apple, as you said, they believe that glyphs should retain their shape, but to the detriment of the clarity of the text. Most likely I’m used to Microsoft’s approach.
This rendering issue only exists with small point size and at low DPI due to the fact you have a limited number of pixels to work with where neither the shape can be represented accurately nor anti aliasing.
As DPI goes up, this issue goes away since you now have enough pixels to represent the shape with proper anti aliasing.
Interestingly enough, we still have a lot of developers working on low dpi screens where their project / game targets users running on high dpi / retina devices.