Heart text art to copy and paste

A big heart copied from an old forum post usually depends on spaces: a few ♥ on the top row, more on the next, and blank space nudging each row into place. Pasted into a caption, those spaces shrink or merge, because Instagram and Facebook use proportional fonts and can squeeze several spaces into one, so the heart slumps to one side. The stacked hearts on this page contain no spaces at all. Every row has the same number of characters, and the shape comes from swapping a filled character for an empty one: ♥ for ♡, █ for ░, ■ for □, 🟥 for ⬜.

Emoji grids are the sturdiest, because every emoji is drawn as a square of the same size, so ⬜🟥⬜🟥⬜ lines up on any phone that has the emoji. The coloured squares such as 🟥 and 🟪 arrived in 2019, in Emoji 12.0, and phones that missed that update show boxes instead. ⬜, ⬛ and ❤️ have been emoji since 2010, which makes the heart built from red hearts the version most likely to work everywhere.

Tip: ♥ is the weak spot in the text grids. Some apps draw it as a red emoji heart, which is wider than ♡, and the rows go crooked. If that happens on your phone, use the block heart of █ and ░ instead: neither character has an emoji form.

• The wings in ε♡з are a Greek epsilon and a Cyrillic ze, chosen because they curve like wings. A reader of Greek or Russian sees two letters first.
• The classic two-line heart, (¯`v´¯) over `·.¸.·´, is built from Latin-1 accents and marks: a macron, acute and grave accents, a cedilla and middle dots. Windows has long typed them with Alt codes, such as Alt+0175 for ¯.
• In ♥╣[-_-]╠♥ the arms are box-drawing characters, made for drawing tables on old text screens, and the face is just brackets, hyphens and an underscore.
• 灬 in (灬♥ω♥灬) is the four-dot form of the Chinese character for fire, the shape it takes at the foot of other characters. Here it makes convincing blushing cheeks.
• 【 and 】 are lenticular brackets from Chinese and Japanese typesetting, where they mark headings and titles.
• (L) and (U) were MSN Messenger codes for a red heart and a broken heart. Instagram doesn’t convert them, so there they stay as plain letters.

A screen reader announces text art one character at a time. The seven-wide grid becomes 35 announcements of “white heart suit” and “black heart suit”, and (♡°▽°♡) comes out as brackets, heart suits and degree signs. For someone listening, a caption that opens with art is a caption they have to sit through.

• Put the words first and the art after them, so the message lands before the decoration.
• Save stacked hearts for posts where the heart is the point, such as an anniversary or a thank-you, and use a one-line piece everywhere else.
• In replies to customers, a single ♡ carries the warmth without the clutter.