pixijs-scene-text

Covers the five text-rendering classes available in PixiJS v8, each balancing styling fidelity, performance, and animation differently. Text renders to a canvas for full CSS-style fidelity, BitmapText reads from a pre-generated glyph atlas for cheap per-frame updates, HTMLText renders an HTML fragment via an SVG foreignObject for rich markup, and SplitText and SplitBitmapText wrap the first two classes to expose per-character, per-word, and per-line containers for animation. All five use options-object constructors of the form new Text({ text, style, ... }); the v7 positional (string, style) form is removed. All text classes are leaf nodes that cannot have children, so multiple instances must be wrapped in a Container to be grouped.

The guidance is organized around choosing the right variant for a workload. Use Text for high-quality static or infrequently updated labels such as titles, menus, dialog, and error messages. Use BitmapText for scores, timers, or any value that changes every frame, since updates only reposition quads instead of re-rasterizing a canvas. Use HTMLText for mixed formatting with real HTML tags like b, i, and br. Both Text and HTMLText support inline colored tags through style.tagStyles, which are only parsed when tagStyles has entries. For per-character animation, SplitText suits short strings and SplitBitmapText suits long strings or many instances. CJK, Arabic, and emoji-heavy text should use Text or HTMLText because the glyph set is too large for a single bitmap atlas.

The document includes an update-cost comparison table, notes on MSDF (Multi-channel Signed Distance Field) fonts that stay sharp at any size, and BitmapFont.install for pre-generating an atlas. Custom fonts are loaded through Assets.load with a family in the data option before setting style.fontFamily. Common mistakes are flagged by severity, including updating Text.text every frame, using positional constructor arguments, omitting the import of pixi.js/text-bitmap under aggressive tree-shaking, and adding children to text instances.