Fonts versus characters
A font is a design applied to text: the same letter A can be drawn in Arial, Georgia or Comic Sans, but the computer still stores one and the same character. When you copy text from a word processor into a chat app, the font is lost because the app decides how its text looks. You cannot choose a font for an Instagram bio or a game username.
Fancy text works around this. Instead of changing the design, it replaces each letter with a different character that already looks styled. Unicode, the list of characters that all modern devices share, contains more than 150,000 characters, and among them are complete styled alphabets. Because they are characters, they travel with the text wherever it is pasted, just like an accented letter or a currency sign.
Try it here: Fancy Text Generator
Open the full tool pageWhere the styled letters come from
Most styles come from a Unicode block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols. Mathematicians use letter styles with different meanings: a bold v can be a vector, a double-struck R the set of real numbers, a fraktur g a Lie algebra. To store such formulas as plain text, Unicode added full alphabets in about a dozen styles. Other styles come from other blocks: circled and parenthesized letters from Enclosed Alphanumerics, wide letters from the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms used with East Asian text, and small capitals and upside down letters from phonetic alphabets that only happen to look right.
| Style | Source in Unicode | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Bold, italic, bold italic | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | A-Z, a-z (bold also 0-9) |
| Script and bold script | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | A-Z, a-z |
| Gothic (fraktur), double-struck | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | A-Z, a-z (double-struck also 0-9) |
| Sans serif and monospace | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | A-Z, a-z, 0-9 |
| Bubble (circled) | Enclosed Alphanumerics | A-Z, a-z, 0-9 |
| Squared | Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement | A-Z only |
| Wide | Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms | Basic Latin letters, digits and punctuation |
| Small caps, upside down, tiny raised | Phonetic and other letters | Most letters, some missing |
| Strikethrough, underline | Combining marks | Every character |
Why some letters stay plain
The mathematical alphabets only cover the 26 basic Latin letters and the ten digits, because that is what formulas need. There is no bold é, no script ç, no gothic ğ and no double-struck ß. A fancy text generator therefore has to leave those letters as they are, which is why a styled name in French, Spanish, German, Turkish or Portuguese can show a plain letter in the middle of a bold word.
A few letters also sit in odd places. The italic small h, the script capital B, E, F, H and others were already in Unicode before the mathematical block was added, so the block has holes and those letters are borrowed from the older Letterlike Symbols block. A careful generator fills the holes correctly; a careless one produces empty boxes.
Line styles are the exception. Strikethrough, underline, double underline, slash and overline are made by adding a combining mark after each character. Combining marks can follow any letter, so these styles work with accented letters, Cyrillic, Greek and other alphabets too. How neat the line looks depends on the font of the app.
Where fancy text works and where it breaks
Almost every current phone and computer has fonts that cover the common styles, so bold, italic, script, gothic and double-struck letters show up in social apps, messengers, email and documents. Rarer characters, such as squared letters or some upside down letters, can show as empty boxes on older systems or in apps with limited fonts.
Some places strip or block unusual characters. Usernames and handles usually allow only plain letters, digits and a few symbols. Search engines and in-app search often do not treat a bold A as the letter A, so a profile written only in fancy letters can be hard to find. Character limits can also be reached sooner, because many styled letters take two units of storage instead of one.
Accessibility: what screen readers hear
A screen reader reads characters by their Unicode names or tries to match them to letters. With mathematical letters the result depends on the device: one reader says mathematical bold capital H, another spells the word letter by letter, a third skips it. For a blind visitor, a bio written entirely in fancy text can become noise.
Use fancy text the way you would use decoration: for a word or a short tagline, not for your name, important information, links, prices or calls to action. Keep at least one plain version of your name in the profile so people can search for you and screen readers can say it.
- Keep names, links and contact details in normal letters.
- Use one style per line rather than mixing many.
- Avoid fancy text in buttons, prices and headings that people need to understand.
- Check the preview for plain letters left among styled ones.
Turning fancy text back into normal text
Because each styled letter maps to exactly one plain letter, the process can be reversed. Paste styled text into the generator and it offers to convert it back to normal letters, which is handy when someone sends you a name you need to search for or a message you want to quote in a document. Upside down text is the one style that is not reversed automatically, since its letters are both swapped and reordered.