Text decorator and borders

Font styles replace each letter with a look-alike symbol. Decorations do the opposite: your letters stay exactly as you typed them, and symbols go before and after. That means a decorated line still works as words. It can be searched, copied, translated and read aloud, which a line in bold or cursive symbols can’t promise.

One style here is a partial exception. The hearts style spaces your letters out, as in ♡ S u n d a y ♡ r e s e t ♡, and once letters are separated by spaces, software sees single letters rather than words. Keep it for short, decorative words.

Borrowed characters keep their identity. To a Lao reader, ໒ is simply the number two, and ঌ is a letter of the Bengali alphabet. A screen reader may announce them that way, by name, in the middle of your line.

Box borders such as ┏━━━┓ are built from box-drawing characters, made for screens where every character has the same width. Instagram, Facebook and most apps use proportional fonts, where an i is narrower than a w, so a box drawn around a line of text rarely closes: the right edge wanders from line to line.

Open borders avoid the problem. Put a line above your text and a line below, and leave the sides off. Because both lines are made of the same characters, they match each other on every screen.

Tip: Apps align text to the left, so centring a word between borders with spaces is guesswork. Start your text at the left edge, under the first character of the border, and it will sit in the same place on every screen.

Screen readers often announce symbols by name. The sparkles frame has about ten symbols on each side, so a listener can hear a string of names like “white four pointed star” before your words and again after them. Box-drawing borders may be read out as a run of “box drawings light horizontal” or skipped, depending on the reader.

• Save full frames for decorative lines, like a bio heading, and keep lines with information plain.
• On a line people need to act on, use one symbol at most, as in ➳ link in bio.
• Don’t decorate every line of a caption. One framed line reads as emphasis; five read as clutter.
• Avoid the spaced-out hearts style for anything longer than a word or two.

To make your own frame, pick two symbols that face each other, such as ⟨ and ⟩ or ꒰ and ꒱, and leave a space on each side of your words so they stay separate from the frame.