Migrate static font assets to Advanced Text Generator

Advanced Text Generator doesn’t support static font assets. If your project uses static font assets, you must migrate them after you enable Advanced Text Generator so that your UI text elements can render correctly.

Unity projects commonly use Static font assets for optimization. Choose your migration approach based on your original optimization goals for the static assets:

• Reduce memory footprint through character set limitation.
• Optimize startup and first-frame performance through a font atlas pre-populated with commonly used characters.
• Remove static font assets without font-asset-specific optimization preservation.

Reduce memory footprint

If you created the static font asset mainly to ship a smaller character set, subset the font file and then create a dynamic font asset from the subset font.

This reduces the font file size and can further lower memory usage because it eliminates the need for a pre-populated atlas texture. For reference, an atlas texture in Alpha 8 is approximately:

• 1024 × 1024 → ~1 MB
• 2048 × 2048 (common for CJK) → ~4 MB

To migrate, do the following:

1. Identify the characters or scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
   See in Glossary required by your UI.
2. Subset the font file with an external tooling.
3. Import the subset font into Unity.
4. Create a dynamic font asset from the subset font.
5. Replace all references to the static font asset (USS/UXML/C#).

Optimize startup or first-frame behavior

If you used a static font asset mainly to pre-populate an atlas (to reduce runtime glyph generation during startup), the equivalent workflow in Advanced Text Generator is to use a dynamic font asset and pre-populate its atlas with a chosen character set.

Note: With SDFAA atlas rendering mode, many projects no longer need to pre-populate an atlas for acceptable first-frame performance. However, if you still require control or warm-up of glyph generation, Advanced Text Generator supports the workflow through a dynamic font asset.

To migrate, do the following:

1. Create or select a dynamic font asset
2. In the Font Asset Creator window, load the dynamic font asset.
3. Populate the atlas with the desired character set.
4. Replace all references to the static font asset (USS/UXML/C#).

Remove static font assets without preserving font-asset-specific optimizations

If you don’t need memory reduction nor startup optimization, you can replace static font references directly with the Unity font asset imported from the typeface file, such as .ttf or .otf.

This requires no font-asset creation step; however, you lose font-asset-specific customization options.

To migrate, do the following:

1. Locate the corresponding Unity font asset (the imported typeface) in the project.
2. Replace references to the static font asset with the Unity font asset (USS/UXML/C#).

Your UI text elements can now render correctly, and you can take advantage of Advanced Text Generator’s enhanced text rendering features going forward.

Additional resources

• Font assets