UniText — The Complete Text Engine for Unity

Demo | 🌐 Website | 📖 Docs | 💬 Discord

TextMeshPro comes with a list of things to work around: baking atlases, missing glyphs, hand-written vertex animation, outlines that eat the letter, broken Arabic. UniText removes the list.

🌐 Every writing system on Earth

Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean — correct out of the box. Unicode 17.0, the latest standard, with the full bidirectional algorithm. 891,757 official conformance tests. Zero failures.

Same text, same font, same scene:

• TextMeshPro — letters disconnected, words reversed. Unreadable to a native speaker. No emoji.

• RTLTMPro plugin — breaks the moment Arabic meets a number or an English word. Chat, prices, dates: wrong.

• UniText — correct. Including selection and editing in right-to-left text.

⚡ 2–20× faster than TextMeshPro and UI Toolkit

Edit one line of a long chat log and only that paragraph is re-processed — the rest is never touched again.

One draw call — however many strokes, shadows and glows a text carries. In world space too, where TextMeshPro's 3D text cannot match it.

Zero GC allocations at runtime.

🔤 No font atlases. No missing characters.

Nothing to bake, nothing to pre-fill, nothing to run out of — and no hitches when a new glyph appears on screen.

Characters the project's fonts don't cover are drawn from the device instead. There are no fallback chains to maintain, and no "the Turkish build shows squares" report a week after launch.

A project can ship with no font files at all. The System Font renders any character the operating system supports, which in practice covers every script in use. It works as the whole typography, or as the layer underneath a project's own fonts. (WebGL aside: browsers don't expose system fonts.)

No atlas texture in the build, and none in the repository — no large binary re-committed to version control every time it grows.

Fonts ship ~2.7× smaller (12 MB → 4.4 MB for Latin and Arabic; CJK is already dense, ~1.3×). A full CJK set costs a few megabytes here, against 80–250 MB as a TextMeshPro atlas.

✨ Text that animates itself

Wave, shake, spin, pulse, wobble, bounce, float, pendulum, glitch, rolling, scramble — eleven kinetic effects, applied with a tag rather than a script.

Typewriter reveal with 19 arrival effects — fade, slide, drop, rain, burst, domino, spiral, glitch and more — mixable per range.

Drive it from a component, a tween, Timeline or an Animator. Scrub backwards and the frames match exactly — text animation that can be previewed and tested.

🎨 Effects that take gradients and textures

TextMeshPro's outline eats the letter. UniText's stroke wraps it — thin text stays thin.

Fill, stroke, shadow, inner shadow, glow — each with a colour, a gradient or a texture. Run one gradient across a whole sentence, or restart it on every glyph.

Any number of layers, each with its own blend mode — a layer stack like a design tool's, not two hard-coded slots. Still one draw call.

Highlight any range with a rounded background — search hits, chat mentions, spoilers. It follows wraps and right-to-left runs by itself.

✍️ Text your players can select, edit and type into

Selection, an editable document model, IME for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, touch handles, a magnifier, and and a context menu built from the project's own scene UI.

Works on Legacy input, the New Input System, or Both — the choice stops mattering.

Password, length limits, phone/card/date masks, filters, validators, placeholders, floating labels, counters — each a small object to drop in, and new ones are straightforward to write.

😀 Real colour emoji, for free

Families 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦, flags 🇺🇸, skin tones 👋🏻👋🏿 — from the device's own font. Zero build size, and new emoji appear as the OS updates, without a patch release. No sprite atlas.

🏷️ Rich text you can extend

TextMeshPro's tag list is fixed. Here <shout>, <whisper>, <rage> — whatever a writer invents — is one line of setup, and a brand-new effect is one small C# class that appears in the inspector beside the built-ins.

Markdown out of the box: **bold**, *italic*, ~~strikethrough~~, ++underline++, [links](url), lists. Paste a writer's document straight in.

🎭 Variable fonts — every weight, width and slant from one file instead of ten. A smaller build, and finer control than preset weight steps allow. The axes can be animated as well.

Font families — define Regular, Bold, Italic, Black once; <b> and <i> pick the right file. No more swapping font assets at runtime.

🌍 3D world text — no Canvas needed. Every language, every effect, plus selection and editing.

🇹🇭 Smart word breaking — Thai, Lao, Khmer and Myanmar put no spaces between words. UniText knows where a line may break.

🖌️ One shader source, four targets — custom text effects compile for Canvas, world space, Built-in and URP from a single file.

📋 Clipboard round trip — copy styled text into a document or a browser and the formatting arrives; copy it back and the exact modifiers return.

📦 What you get

Five sample scenes, importable straight from the Package Manager. Full documentation. Complete C# API.

Half the engine — LightSide Core — is free and open under MIT. No lock-in.

💬 Direct developer support

Questions go to the developer rather than a ticket queue. Replies usually arrive within 10 minutes and bugs are fixed in hours. The Discord link sits at the top of this page, and questions there are answered before a purchase as readily as after one.

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, WebGL.

Unity: 2022.3 LTS or newer.

Built on HarfBuzz and FreeType — the same stack that renders text in Chrome, Firefox and Android.

UniText Folio — Text Engine for Unity