Fancy text generator

The generator sorts its styles into nine groups. Here is “Make it fancy” in one style from each, roughly from the most readable to the least.

The top half keeps every letter recognisable. Further down, the letters get rounder, busier or, in the last group, swapped for characters from other writing systems that only resemble Latin ones.

Many styles are simple arithmetic. Unicode stores each maths alphabet in order, so bold starts with 𝐀 at U+1D400, 𝐁 is the next code point, and the small letters begin at U+1D41A. Cursive, Old English, outline and the rest each have their own starting point. Where Unicode left a gap because a letter had already been encoded elsewhere, the generator swaps in that older character.

Other styles use a lookup table, letter by letter: small caps, tiny text, upside-down text and the look-alike alphabets. Lines and glitch effects add combining marks after each character, and frames put symbols on either side. The method decides how your text behaves after you paste it:

So when a line has to be found or read aloud, wrapping is the safe kind of fancy: ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* Make it fancy *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ still contains the words “Make it fancy.” A replacing style looks more dramatic but can hide the words from software that reads them.

Invitations are where fancy text earns its place. A pattern that works in a post or a message: one decorative line to catch the eye, one quieter line, and the details in plain text.

1. Headline in cursive or Old English: 𝒴ℴ𝓊’𝓇ℯ 𝒾𝓃𝓋𝒾𝓉ℯ𝒹
2. What it is, in small caps: ᴛᴏ ᴏᴜʀ ɢᴀʀᴅᴇɴ ᴘᴀʀᴛʏ
3. Date, time and place in plain text, so they can be read aloud, copied and searched
4. How to reply, also plain, such as “Reply here by Friday so we can plan the food”

Tip: Keep the decorative line to a few words. Script and Old English slow readers down quickly, and on a phone a long fancy line wraps into something hard to follow.

One style in the generator is literally named Fancy, and it doesn't use maths letters at all. It borrows syllables and radicals from the Yi script, which is used to write the language of the Yi people in southwest China, chosen because their shapes resemble Latin letters. “Make it fancy” becomes ꎭꍏꀘꏂ ꀤ꓄ ꎇꍏꈤꏳꌩ.

The rest of the look-alike group works the same way. One style swaps in Cherokee letters plus a few Ethiopic ones, like the ፈ standing in for c in ᎷᏗᏦᏋ ᎥᏖ ᎦᏗᏁፈᎩ; another uses mostly Cyrillic letters; a third builds words from currency signs. To someone who reads those scripts the result is nonsense, and a screen reader may skip it or read out stray syllables. They're fine for a joke or one decorative word, not for anything that has to be understood.