Unity is excited to announce a powerful new addition to our creative tools suite: TextMesh Pro and its creator, Stephan Bouchard, have joined Unity!

TextMesh Pro is a replacement for Unity’s existing text components like Text Mesh and UI Text. TextMesh Pro uses Signed Distance Field (SDF) as its primary text rendering pipeline making it possible to render text cleanly at any point size and resolution. Using a set of custom shaders designed to leverage the power of SDF text rendering, TextMesh Pro makes it possible to dynamically change the visual appearance of the text by simply changing material properties to add visual styles such as dilation, outline, soft shadow, beveling, textures, glow, etc. and to save and recall these visual styles by creating/using material presets.

TextMesh Pro provides improved control over text layout and formatting giving users control over character, word, line and paragraph spacing, support for kerning and basic hyphenation, additional text alignment modes like Justified and Flush text, over 30 Rich Text Tags are available giving users control over margins, indentation, user definable styles, links and even support for using multiple fonts and graphics inline with the text.

Optimized for both mobile and PC, head to the Asset Store today to download the new, freely available version of TextMesh Pro today (Unity 5.3 or higher required, Unity 5.6 compatible release coming soon).

We have already started work to integrate TextMesh Pro’s functionality into Unity 2017, and will continue to support the asset with periodic updates to functionality and compatibility to ensure a seamless experience for TextMesh Pro users.