Facebook font generator for posts and comments

Here is “Garage sale this Saturday” in the six styles this page shows first. Nearly every letter comes from the same Unicode block of maths characters, so they all work on the same devices. What changes is the tone, and what happens to numbers.

Numbers split the six into two camps. Bold, outline and typewriter have digits of their own, so “Open 8am to 2pm” becomes 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝟖𝐚𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝟐𝐩𝐦 or 𝕆𝕡𝕖𝕟 𝟠𝕒𝕞 𝕥𝕠 𝟚𝕡𝕞. Unicode has no italic or cursive digits, so in the other three styles the numbers stay plain and upright: 𝑂𝑝𝑒𝑛 8𝑎𝑚 𝑡𝑜 2𝑝𝑚.

Tip: Typewriter letters look like code, which makes them tempting for a promo code such as 𝚂𝙰𝚅𝙴𝟷𝟶. Resist it. Anyone who copies that code gets maths characters instead of S, A, V, E, 1 and 0, and a checkout won't recognise it. Codes, links and email addresses belong in plain text.

Look closely at 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 in the italic example. The h is ℎ, a character Unicode encoded in 1993 as a physics symbol: the italic h that scientists write for a constant in quantum physics. It lives in the Letterlike Symbols block alongside other letters with a technical job, such as ℕ for the natural numbers.

When the maths alphabets arrived in Unicode 3.1 in 2001, that letter wasn't encoded a second time. The italic set has an empty, reserved slot where h would be, and generators fill it with the older ℎ. Usually nobody notices. On some phones, though, ℎ is drawn from a different font than its neighbours, so it can look a little larger, thinner or out of line.

Cursive and outline borrow letters in the same way, such as ℯ and ℴ in cursive and ℍ and ℝ in outline. Bold, bold italic and typewriter have no gaps: every letter in those styles comes from one set.

Tip: If the h looks wrong on your screen, use bold italic instead. Its 𝒉 belongs to the same set as the letters beside it, so 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 stays even.

Facebook's help page on names asks for the name your friends call you in everyday life. It also lists what a profile name can't include: symbols, numbers, unusual capitalization, repeating characters or punctuation, characters from more than one language, titles, and words or phrases in place of a name.

Styled text runs into that list from several sides. Bold, italic and cursive letters come from a Unicode block officially named Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols. Look-alike styles such as Faux Cyrillic and Tribal swap in letters from Cyrillic, Cherokee and Ethiopic, which is exactly the mixing of languages the rules exclude. Nicknames are allowed when they're a form of your real name, like Bob for Robert, but they still have to be written in ordinary letters.

Where a styled touch does fit on your profile instead:

• Your bio in the Intro section can carry one styled line.
• Posts and comments aren't covered by the name rules, so styled text is fine there.
• Your cover photo can use any real font you like if you design it as an image. Because it's a picture, it looks identical on every screen.

Styled letters work best as a frame around plain facts. Here is how a garage sale post can mix them, line by line:

• 𝐆𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐲, in bold, because the first line is what people see in the feed before deciding to read on.
• Toys, books, a bike and kitchen things, in plain text, so the list reads quickly on any device.
• 9am to 1pm, 14 Elm Road, also plain, because people copy times and addresses into their maps and calendars.
• 𝑁𝑜 𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑦 𝑏𝑖𝑟𝑑𝑠, 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒, in italic: a friendly aside that matters less than the facts.

That's two styled lines out of four. Some screen readers read styled letters one character at a time and others skip them, so a post where only the headline and the aside are styled still makes complete sense to someone listening to it.