Bold text generator

Each style below is a complete bold alphabet from Unicode's maths letters. They differ in mood, and in whether numbers turn bold as well.

Only the two upright styles come with bold digits. On the plus side, none of the six has gaps. Plain italic, cursive and Old English each borrow a few letters from older symbol sets, but every bold letter comes from one unbroken alphabet, so nothing in a bold word looks out of place.

Bold and capitals both raise the volume, but not in the same way. Most readers get through lowercase faster than capitals, largely because nearly everything we read is in lowercase. So bold lowercase is noticed first and still read quickly, while a line of capitals slows people down, and bold capitals are louder still.

Bold capitals suit one short word, like 𝗡𝗘𝗪 or 𝗦𝗢𝗟𝗗 𝗢𝗨𝗧, and almost never a full sentence. Bold Old English shouldn't be set in capitals at all: 𝕹𝕰𝖂 𝕸𝕰𝕹𝖀 is close to unreadable.

Once text is bold, your phone stops treating it as words, and that changes how you should work:

• Spell check and autocorrect can't help. They don't recognise bold characters as words, so a typo made before converting stays in the post. Proofread the plain version, then convert it.
• Editing means retyping. Nothing turns bold off again, so to change one word you delete the bold text and paste a new version.
• Keep a plain copy of anything you convert, such as a bio, in your notes. Then you can change a word later without rebuilding the whole thing.

Tip: Type only the words you want in bold into the box above, then paste them into the plain text you've already written. The less you convert, the less there is to go wrong.

Both apps already set some text in bold, and pasted bold competes with it. On Instagram, usernames are bold in comments and at the start of captions, and your name on your profile is bold too. On Facebook, people's names above posts and comments are bold.

That has two practical effects. In the feed, a caption that opens with bold words runs straight on from your bold username, so the two can blur together; a plain first word or an emoji puts a gap between them. And bolding your name with pasted characters changes less than you'd expect on your profile, where it's already heavy, so a bold first line in your bio usually does more.