Level Up UI with a Roblox Studio Rich Text Script

If you're tired of boring, one-color labels in your game, learning how to use a roblox studio rich text script is the fastest way to make your UI actually look professional. We've all been there—you want to highlight a specific word in a sentence, like making a player's name green or a legendary item's name purple, but Roblox's standard TextLabel properties apply to the whole string. It's either all red or none of it is. Rich text fixes that frustration by letting you style individual characters or words inside a single string.

Honestly, it's one of those features that seems intimidating until you realize it's basically just using a few simple tags, similar to how HTML works. Once you get the hang of it, you'll probably never go back to plain text again.

Getting the Basics Out of the Way

Before you even touch a script, there's one tiny thing you have to do in the Properties window. If you don't check the box that says RichText, your script is just going to display all those brackets and tags literally. Your players will see Hello instead of a red "Hello," which is definitely not the vibe we're going for.

In the Explorer, grab your TextLabel, TextButton, or TextBox, find the "RichText" property under the Appearance or Text section, and make sure it's toggled on. Now you're ready to actually start coding.

How to Format Your Strings

When you're writing a roblox studio rich text script, the core idea is wrapping your text in tags. These tags tell the engine, "Hey, from this point to that point, make the text look like this."

The most common tags you'll end up using are: * Bold: your text * Italic: your text * Underline: your text * Strikethrough: <s>your text</s> * Font Color: your text * Font Size: your text

It looks a bit messy in the code editor, but the results in-game are worth it. You can even nest them. If you want something bold and red, you just wrap the bold tags inside the color tags.

Scripting Dynamic Text

Static UI is fine for instructions, but the real power of a roblox studio rich text script comes when you're dealing with variables. Imagine a shop system where you want to tell the player they don't have enough gold.

Instead of a plain message, you could do something like this:

```lua local label = script.Parent local playerGold = 50 local itemCost = 100

label.Text = "You need " .. (itemCost - playerGold) .. " more gold!" ```

By concatenating the strings with the color tags, the actual number becomes red while the rest of the sentence stays white (or whatever your default color is). It's a small detail, but it makes the game feel much more "premium."

One thing to watch out for is quotation marks. Since Lua uses quotes to define strings, and rich text tags often use quotes for things like hex codes or font names, you'll need to use double quotes on the outside and single quotes on the inside, or use escape characters (like \"). Personally, I find using single quotes for the tag attributes way easier to read.

The Magic of the Stroke Tag

For a long time, we had to use a UIStroke object to get outlines on text. While that still works for the whole label, the rich text <stroke> tag is a total game changer for specific words. It lets you add an outline to just one part of your sentence.

You can customize the color, thickness, and even the "join" style. Here's a quick example:

<stroke color="#000000" thickness="2">Epic Loot!</stroke>

This is perfect for those "Level Up" notifications or rare item drops where you want the text to pop against a busy background. If you've ever had a player complain that they can't read the text because it blends into the sky, adding a quick stroke via script is the easiest fix.

Changing Fonts on the Fly

Roblox recently made it much easier to swap fonts within a single string too. You aren't stuck with "SourceSans" for the whole block anymore. You can use the  tag with the face attribute.

For example: "Normal text and then some action text!"

This is huge for RPGs. You could have a character's dialogue use a normal font, but emphasize certain "magical" words with a more stylized, fantasy-looking font. It adds a layer of personality to the writing that wasn't really possible before without using a bunch of separate TextLabels layered on top of each other.

Handling the Typewriter Effect

If you're building a dialogue system, you're probably using a "typewriter" effect where the text appears one letter at a time. This is where a roblox studio rich text script can get a little tricky.

If you just loop through the string and set the Text property to string.sub(fullText, 1, i), the script will eventually try to display half of a tag. For a split second, your player will see <fon before the script finishes the tag. It looks broken and jittery.

The "pro" way to handle this is by using a helper function or a module that recognizes tags and skips over them during the typing process. Essentially, you want the script to "jump" from the start of a tag to the end of it instantly, while still typing the visible characters one by one. There are some great community-made modules for this, but if you're writing your own, just remember to check for that < character and skip ahead to the closing >.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Even if you're a pro, you'll probably mess up a few times. The most common headache is forgetting to close a tag. If you open a  but forget the , sometimes the rest of your UI just breaks or the formatting carries over to parts of the string you didn't intend to change.

Another weird one is the "layout" issue. Rich text can sometimes change the height of a line if you use different font sizes in the same string. If your UI constraints are really tight, a larger font size mid-sentence might clip the text or push it out of the box. Always give your TextLabels a bit of extra padding when you're planning to use varied sizes.

Also, keep an eye on performance. While one or two labels using rich text won't do anything, if you have a massive scrolling frame with hundreds of items all running complex scripts to update rich text every frame, you might see a tiny bit of lag on lower-end mobile devices. It's rare, but it's something to keep in mind if you're going overboard with the styling.

Wrapping It Up

Using a roblox studio rich text script is really about giving your game that extra bit of polish. It takes the UI from looking like a basic prototype to looking like a finished product. Whether it's highlighting key terms in a tutorial, color-coding player ranks in a chat, or just making a "Buy" button look more exciting, the flexibility of rich text is hard to beat.

Don't be afraid to experiment with the tags. You can't really "break" anything—at worst, your text will just look a bit funky until you fix the syntax. Start small with some bolding and colors, and before you know it, you'll be building complex, dynamic UI systems that look awesome. Happy scripting!