TextMeshDOTS

TextMeshDOTS is a standalone text package for DOTS, forked from Latios Framework/Calligraphics. Utilizing TextCore font assets, TextMeshDOTS renders world space text similar to TextMeshPro. It leverages the Unity Entities package to generate the vertex data required for rendering, and uses native Unity Entities Graphics for rendering. The HDRP and URP shader are wrapper around the TextMeshPro 4.0 SRP shader. TextMeshDOTS supports almost all rich text tags of TextMeshPro and TextCore: <allcaps>, <alpha>, <b>, <color>, <cspace>, <font>, <i>, <lowercase>, <sub>, <sup>, <pos>, <voffset>, <size>, <space=000.00>, <mspace=xx.x>, <smallcaps>, <scale=xx.x>, <rotate>. Other tags are recognized but not yet rendered.

How to use

(1) Autoring workflow

• Generate backend mesh: Menue-->TextMeshDOTS-->Text BackendMesh
  • this only needs to be done once in a given project
• Create a SubScene
• Add empty GameObject, and TextRenderer component on it
• Create a Font Asset. You can use TextMeshDOTS/Fonts/LiberationSans SDF. If you create one yourself, use the normal TextCore workflow to create a font asset, populate the atlas in static mode, and ensure the material shader is set to TextMeshDOTS/Shader/TextMeshDOTS-URP (or -HDRP)
• Add font asset TextMeshDOTS/Fonts/LiberationSans SDF to the list of fonts of the TextRenderer, or add the font assets you created
• When attaching multiple fonts, the rich text tag <font=name_of_font> can be used for selecting them
• Type in some text or rich text
• Close the SubScene
• You should now see the text

(2) Runtime instantiation workflow

• Generate backend mesh: Menue-->TextMeshDOTS-->Text BackendMesh
  • this only needs to be done once in a given project
• Create a SubScene
• Add empty GameObject, add FontBlobAuthoring component on it
• Add font asset TextMeshDOTS/Fonts/LiberationSans SDF to the list of fonts (and any additional fonts you like to access during runtim)
• Close the SubScene
• Enable auto creation and modify TextMeshDOTS/RuntimeSpawner/RuntimeSingleFontTextRendererSpawner.cs or RuntimeMultiFontTextRendererSpawner.cs to spawn any number of TextRenderer entities. Per default, auto creation of both systems is disabled. When auto creation is enabled, which spawner system runs depends on how many fonts are added to FontBlobAuthoring
• Hit play

Known issues

• None at this time

Special Thanks To the original authors and contributors

• Dreaming381 - not only has he created the amazing Latios Framework, including the Calligraphics text module, but has also been of tremendous support in figuring out how to create a standalone version of Calligraphics that uses Entity Graphics instead of the Kinemation rendering engine.
• Sovogal – significant contributions to the Calligraphics module of Latios Framework (including the name)