Bold & italic text for social posts
Social apps have no bold button, so people borrow look-alike letters from Unicode's maths symbols. Here they all are, with a clear look at what they cost in accessibility, and a converter that turns them back into plain text.
Use it for a word or two, not a whole post. These are not letters with formatting but different symbols that only look like letters. Screen readers may spell them out one by one or skip them, search and hashtags do not match them, and some phones show empty boxes.
A screen reader may announce your first word in bold as: mathematical bold capital h, mathematical bold small e, mathematical bold small l, mathematical bold small l, mathematical bold small o
Pick a style to copy
- Bold (serif)
- Italic (serif)
- Bold italic (serif)
- Sans-serif
- Bold (sans)
- Italic (sans)
- Bold italic (sans)
- Script
- Bold script
- Fraktur (blackletter)
- Bold fraktur
- Double-struck (outline)
- Monospace
- Strikethrough
- Underline
Styled text back to plain
What these letters really are
Unicode has a block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, made so that mathematicians can tell a bold ๐ฑ from an italic ๐ฅ in formulas. Each style is a full alphabet of separate characters. Typing them into a post looks like formatting, but the platform sees symbols, not words. A few letters, such as the italic โ and the script โฌ, come from an older block of letterlike symbols, which is why they can look slightly different.
That is why they have costs. A screen reader may read a styled name letter by letter or say nothing at all, a search for your words will not find them, and a hashtag written in styled letters is not the same hashtag. Strikethrough and underline work differently: they add a combining mark after every character, which can double the length of your text on platforms that count code points.
Good uses are small: a single highlighted word, a heading in a bio, a product name. Keep names, hashtags, links and anything people need to read aloud in plain text.
Questions
Why do some letters show as boxes?
The device has no font with that character. Recent phones and computers cover these alphabets well; older ones and some smart TVs or car screens may not.
Do styled letters count more on X?
Yes. They sit outside the range that X weighs as 1, so each styled letter counts as 2. A 140-character bold line uses the full 280.
Can I use bold letters in my display name?
Many platforms accept them, but people searching for your name will type plain letters and may not find you. Keep the name itself plain and style a short word around it if you must.