Using TextMeshPro in a 2D Unity game

Unity has a simple, easy-to-use 2D text option under UI->Legacy->Text. However, this puts a text element on the weird ethereal Canvas that UI stuff sits on, which is probably not what you want (or at least not what I want). I want my text to be nested in other sprites in my scene. To do this, we can use TextMesh Pro objects.

TextMesh Pro was a Unity acquisition in 2017 and since then they’ve more-or-less integrated it into Unity. That said, the first thing you have to do is actually install it, so go to Window ->TextMeshPro -> Import TMP Essential Resources. Now you can use it.

To actually use TextMesh Pro, create a GameObject -> 3D Object -> Text (TextMeshPro). There is a similarly-named component under UI, but do not be fooled! If you use that one, it’ll be placed on a Canvas. Stick with the sprite-y 3D Object one, even in a 2D game. Now you can nest this object as a child of your other GameObjects and local scaling and positioning will work correctly.

From your scripts, you can reference TextMeshPro through its intuitively named package. Start with:

// Such package. Wow.
using TMPro;

Then the component is of type TMP_Text, so you can do:

// This class name...
TMP_Text scoreText = scoreObj.GetComponent<TMP_Text>();
scoreText.text = "Score: 0";

And that’s it. Now you have a nice text block that you can treat like a “normal” Sprite, not some weird 2D thing that lives on its own detached plane of existence.

(Side note: I’ve been mainly using Python for the last few years, so I’m very salty about how ambiguous and terribly-named packages in C# are.)