Bubble letters to copy and paste

Here is “Party at 8” in each style. What separates them is whether small letters survive and what happens to the number.

The plain bubble style is the safe choice: it keeps lowercase, covers every digit and uses the oldest of these characters. Black bubbles look bolder, but everything becomes a capital, which reads as shouting in a long line. Squares suit one short word, like 🅂🄰🄻🄴, better than a sentence.

Four of the black square letters double as emoji. 🅰, 🅱 and 🅾 are the A, B and O blood type buttons, and 🅿 is the P button used for parking. Unicode marks them as text by default, but some phones and apps draw them as coloured emoji anyway, so 🅿🅰🆁🆃🆈 can come out as two emoji buttons followed by three black squares.

The circled capital Ⓜ has the same double life. It is on the emoji list too, so a bubble-letter word with a capital M can show that one letter in colour.

Tip: If a word has A, B, O or P in it, use the plain bubble or square style instead of black squares, and look at the post on a second phone before you rely on it.

The plain circled letters, ⓐ to ⓩ and Ⓐ to Ⓩ, belong to Unicode's Enclosed Alphanumerics block, next to circled numbers such as ① and ⑳. The black circles, the squares and the bracketed capitals came later. Most of them were added in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, in a supplement block made mainly for compatibility with Japanese TV broadcasting standards and the emoji sets of Japanese phone networks.

A few quirks follow from that. Only capitals exist for the black circles and squares, which is why the generator turns small letters into capitals. The bracket style mixes the two blocks: small letters like ⒜ are the older characters, while capitals like 🄐 come from the newer supplement, so on an older phone the capitals are the likelier ones to show as boxes.

To Unicode, ⓑ is a symbol, not the letter b. Screen readers handle that in different ways: many read the characters one at a time, some announce each one's full name (“circled Latin small letter b”), and some skip them. A caption written entirely in bubble letters can come out as a stream of names or as silence. Search has a similar blind spot, because these characters don't match the letters people type.

• Use bubble letters for one decorative word, like ⓝⓔⓦ or a shop name, not for whole sentences.
• Keep anything people need to act on in plain text: dates, prices, addresses and instructions.
• Write hashtags and @mentions in plain letters, or they won't point to the real tag or account.
• If your name is in bubble letters, also write it in plain letters in your bio so it stays readable to everyone.

If you came for the fat, cartoon-style letters used on posters and birthday cards, those are drawn rather than typed. The usual method works on paper or in any drawing app:

1. Write the word in thin, simple capitals, with more space than usual between the letters.
2. Draw a rounded outline around each letter, keeping the same gap from the thin line all the way round and softening every corner.
3. Where two letters overlap, choose which one sits in front and erase the hidden part of the one behind.
4. Erase the thin skeleton inside, then go over the outline with a thicker pen or brush.
5. Add a small curved shine mark near the top of each letter and a shadow along one side, with the light coming from the same direction every time.