Vertical Text

Questions & Answers
1

Hey everyone,

Try as I may, I just can’t seem to find an answer to the following question - is there a way to display text vertically instead of horizontally (from within the GUI or OnGUI settings)?

Example:

“Hello World”

"

H

e

l

l

o

"

I’m trying to set up a screen of text in Japanese and I need it to display vertically (running from right to left) is possible.

Any ideas?

3

You’d make a function for doing so. As a quick example,

function OnGUI () {
	GUILayout.Label(VerticalText("Hello"));
}

function VerticalText (input : String) : String {
	var sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder(input.Length*2);
	for (var i = 0; i < input.Length; i++) {
		sb.Append(input*).Append("

");*

  • }*
  • return sb.ToString();*
    }
    Ideally you’d want to preprocess the text, rather than converting it over and over like that every frame.
2

I don’t know of a built in way to do this but I would loop over the input string as an array and make smaller arrays for each column (you can pick an arbitrary row count for a column or do some math with the screen height and font size) then set up your GUI as follows

GUILayout.BeginHorizontal()
    // loop over columns with
    GUILayout.BeginVertical()
        // loop over characters in a column with
        GUILayout.Label()
    GUILayout.EndVertical()
GUILayout.EndHorizontal()

Probably not the most efficient way of doing this but it’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

If you instead want to rotate the whole thing (characters included) check out GUI.matrix which is lacking thorough documentation but a good example can be found in this post by Hanford Lemoore

4

I ultimately converted a word file into a texture and applied it to a plane. Was an awkward, time-consuming process but it got the job done. The scripts above were both informative and creative, but didn’t mesh well with the Japanese language. Thanks for the suggestions!

5

There is a better method.

Straight out of C# referrence - what they do is they use GUI.matrix to rotate the text on its side. it’s an elegant solution which provides least amount of headache.