Vaporwave text generator

Vaporwave started in the early 2010s as a microgenre of electronic music, made and shared almost entirely online. Its tracks slowed down and looped samples of 1980s and 1990s lounge music, smooth jazz and shopping-centre background music, and the name plays on vaporware: software that is announced and then never released.

A visual style grew up alongside the music: early web graphics, old operating-system windows, classical statues, palm trees, sunsets in pastel pink and teal, and Japanese text. Full-width letters fitted that mood, since they came out of East Asian computing of the same era. The word aesthetic, spelled ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ, came to stand for the whole look, which is why vaporwave text, wide text and aesthetic text now usually mean the same characters.

Nobody adds extra spaces to get the airy look. Each wide letter, such as ａ at U+FF41, is drawn in the middle of a full square, so the gap is part of the character, and the generator swaps every space for an ideographic space, U+3000, which is a full square too. Unicode only made wide versions of the basic keyboard set, for East Asian text, so anything outside it passes through unchanged:

Tip: Typing on an iPhone? Smart Punctuation turns ' into ’, which has no full-width form, so a word like don’t comes out as ｄｏｎ’ｔ with a thin apostrophe in the middle. Turn it off under Settings, General, Keyboard, or reword to avoid the apostrophe.

Wide letters are only half of the usual look. Most vaporwave titles add a little Japanese decoration or a frame of symbols, and you can build that here in two passes: copy the wide version, paste it back into the box, then copy it again from the Stars or Sparkles style. Those two styles only wrap your text, so the wide letters inside stay wide.

• ★彡 ｎｉｇｈｔ　ｄｒｉｖｅ 彡★: wide text inside the Stars frame, with a shooting star at each end.
• ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ｓｕｎｓｅｔ　ｍａｌｌ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧: the Sparkles frame, which suits a bio header better than a long caption.
• Ａ　Ｅ　Ｓ　Ｔ　Ｈ　Ｅ　Ｔ　Ｉ　Ｃ: type the word with a space after every letter, then copy the wide version. Every space turns full width, so the gaps stay even.
• ｌｏｓｔ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｍａｌｌ　１９９５: a year in full-width digits keeps the same rhythm as the words before it.

Use it the way vaporwave artwork does, as a title rather than body text. A wide line on its own reads like a track name; a paragraph of it is hard work, and screen readers don't all handle full-width letters the same way, with some spelling each word out letter by letter.

Both frames borrow from Japanese writing. The 彡 in the Stars frame is a Chinese character, the radical Unicode names bristle, made of three slanting strokes. Japanese text art uses those strokes as motion lines, so ★彡 reads as a star streaking across the screen.

The Sparkles frame takes two characters from the half-width side of the same block as the wide letters. ･ is the half-width katakana middle dot, and ﾟ is the half-width form of the small circle that turns the syllable ha into pa. In the frame they're there purely for their shape, scattered like glitter around the stars.

Tip: Vaporwave artwork often carries a line of Japanese words. If you can't read Japanese, skip pasting a phrase you found or ran through a translator: it may not say what you think, and people who read Japanese will notice. A frame or a single symbol gives the feel without that risk.