Bold italic text generator

Unicode has two complete bold italic alphabets. The serif one, with small feet on its letters, looks like emphasis in a printed book: 𝑩𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒄. The sans one has plain, even strokes and reads more like a poster or a sports banner: 𝘽𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙘. Their official names spell it out. The first capital A is “mathematical bold italic capital A” (U+1D468); the second is “mathematical sans-serif bold italic capital A” (U+1D63C).

On a phone, the sans version usually holds up better at small sizes because its strokes are even. The serif version suits names, titles and anything meant to feel a little formal or literary.

Type “Doors open at 9” and the letters slant but the 9 doesn't. Unicode added styled digits in only five styles: bold, outline (double-struck), sans, sans bold and typewriter. There are no italic digits of any weight, which fits an old rule of maths typesetting: numbers stay upright even when the letters around them slant.

The workaround is to borrow weight instead of slant. Bold digits from the sans bold style sit well beside sans bold italic letters, as in 𝙊𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝟯 𝙡𝙚𝙛𝙩: the 3 is upright, but it matches the weight, so the line reads as one piece. With the serif bold italic, the serif bold digits, like 𝟗, are the closer match.

Tip: Prices, times and phone numbers are often better left as plain digits. People copy them, and plain digits are what phones look for when they offer to call a number or save a date.

The maths alphabets cover the 26 basic letters in both cases, plus Greek for equations, and no accented letters at all. An é, ñ, ü or ç has no bold italic version, so the generator leaves it alone: “Café” comes out as 𝑪𝒂𝒇é, with a thin upright letter at the end. Words in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese are the most affected.

One letter has a story. In the plain italic set, the small h is borrowed: it's ℎ, the Planck constant symbol (U+210E), which Unicode encoded years before the maths alphabets and didn't add a second time. Bold italic has no such gap. Its 𝒉 comes from the same run of characters as its neighbours, so 𝒕𝒉𝒆 looks even, while italic 𝑡ℎ𝑒 can look slightly mismatched on some phones.

• Punctuation and symbols, including apostrophes, @ and #, don't change.
• Accented capitals such as É and Ö stay plain, like their small letters.
• Letters from other alphabets, such as Cyrillic or Devanagari, are left as they are.
• Emoji keep their colour and shape.

Pasted bold italic is a workaround for apps that have no formatting. Where real formatting exists, use it: the words stay searchable, screen readers treat them as words, and you can remove the style with a click.

Instagram captions, bios and comments, and everyday Facebook posts, offer nothing like this, which is why people paste characters instead.

Bold italic is the loudest text style short of capitals, so it works in small doses. Think of the word you'd stress if you said the sentence aloud: “I 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 post on a Monday.” One styled word per sentence carries the stress. Style the whole paragraph and the stress disappears, because no word is louder than its neighbours.

• Pick one style per post. Serif and sans bold italic side by side look like a mistake.
• Avoid bold italic capitals for whole lines. 𝙎𝘼𝙇𝙀 𝙉𝙊𝙒 in heavy, slanted capitals is slow to read at a glance.
• Remember people who listen to posts. Screen readers don't announce emphasis from these characters; many read them one at a time or skip them, so the stressed word can be the one that goes missing.
• Keep links, codes and handles plain so they still work when someone copies them.