Bold font to copy and paste

The styles shown first above differ in weight and in shape. Here is “Back in stock Friday” in each of them.

Plain bold is what most people mean, and it sits most naturally beside the sans-serif type that Instagram and Facebook use. Serif bold looks printed, more like a menu or a newspaper headline. Sans serif and Typewriter aren’t bold at all: they show the same kind of letters at regular weight, which helps you judge how much the bold adds, and Typewriter’s even spacing gives a line the look of a receipt or a label.

A font you install usually comes in a range of weights. Web designers number them from 100, the thinnest, to 900, the heaviest, with 400 for regular and 700 for bold. Pasted bold has exactly one weight. Unicode has no light, semi-bold or extra-bold letters, so anything offered as “extra bold” is the same characters or another style under a new name.

Even that one weight isn’t fixed. What you paste is a run of character codes, not a design, and each phone draws them with whatever font it keeps for maths letters, so the same caption can look heavier on one screen than another. For something blacker than bold, the nearest style here is Black square, white capitals in black boxes, though every letter becomes a capital and some, such as 🅰 and 🅾, may turn into emoji.

Copy a bold heading out of a post into a document or an email and you may not know which kind you’ve got. These checks tell them apart:

1. Paste it into a plain text box, such as a search bar. Formatting is dropped on the way, so real bold arrives as normal letters, while pasted bold stays bold because the weight is in the characters.
2. In a document, select it and press Ctrl+B, or Cmd+B on a Mac. Real bold switches off; pasted bold doesn’t budge.
3. Change the font. Real bold follows the new font, while pasted bold keeps looking exactly as it did.

If it turns out to be pasted bold, retype it before you use it in anything formal. Spellcheck and screen readers don’t treat maths characters as ordinary words, and the characters may print in an unexpected font.

For a poster, a logo, slides or anything printed, use an installed font with a bold weight rather than these characters. Montserrat and Poppins, for example, are free on Google Fonts in nine weights, from Thin to Black. Install one on your computer to use it in Word, or pick it in a design app that already includes it.

In a document, real bold is a shortcut away: select the text and press Ctrl+B, or Cmd+B on a Mac. That bold is formatting laid over ordinary letters, so it can be switched off the same way, and everything from spellcheck to screen readers still sees plain words.

Bold works best as signposts. Bold the label at the start of a line and leave the detail after it plain, so people can scan down the left edge and still copy what they need:

• 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 Tue to Sun, 9 to 6
• 𝗢𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 DM us or use the link below

In a caption, bold the first line: it’s what shows before Instagram cuts a long caption off with “more”. Leave phone numbers, emails, prices and links plain. A bold version is made of different characters, so it may not work when someone taps or copies it.