Godot Displayed Text

RichTextLabel and Label both have a set of properties called "Displayed Text" that you can use to control how much of the text is shown on screen and how that text is displayed.¹

visible_characters and visible_ratio allow you to define how much of the text you would like to show, allowing you to do animations that make the text appear like it is being typed out. visible_characters allows you to do this by defining how many characters to show while visible_ratio allows you to do this by defining a percentage (between the value of 0.0 and 1.0) ²

visible_characters_behavior lets you define how those characters appear onto the screen. VC_CHARS_BEFORE_SHAPING looks exactly like text being typed by a user onto the screen, while VC_CHARS_AFTER_SHAPING shows the text where it would be after all the text is typed, preventing the visual flicker when text is added to the end of a line before jumping to the next line due to reaching the maximum length of the line. ³

I'm not sure what the other values for visible_characters_behaviour does exactly, though I imagine you'll have to use them if you are integrating support for RTL languages. ⁴

Example

For example, consider the following examples of a RichTextLabel with the Lorem Ipsum text inside of a CenterContainer. I added a simple script which increases the visible_characters value from 0 to its maximum value every frame. ⁵

extends RichTextLabel

func _ready() -> void:
	visible_characters = 0

func _process(_delta: float) -> void:
	visible_characters += 1

The VC_CHARS_BEFORE_SHAPING value causes the text to "jump" to the next line when there isn't enough space and the first line of the text moves further and further up the screen as more text is displayed: ⁶

The VC_CHARS_AFTER_SHAPING value causes the text to always appear in the right place: ⁷

As an additional note, all of the Displayed Text properties take BBCode into account, so it will always be displayed properly: ⁸