Bold Text Generator

How the bold text generator works

Most bios, names and captions have no bold button. Bold text gets around that with different characters: Unicode has whole bold alphabets, made for math, where a bold 𝐱 and a plain x can mean different things. Because they are ordinary characters, they stay bold wherever you paste them, and other people see them bold too.

You get six bold styles. Bold and Bold sans change letters and numbers. Bold italic, Bold italic sans, Bold cursive and Bold gothic change letters only, because Unicode has no matching numbers, so digits stay plain.

Which bold style to pick

They all read as bold, but each sets a different tone:

• Bold sans: plain bold letters with no serifs, close to the text most apps already use.
• Bold: bold letters with serifs, like bold in a printed book.
• Bold italic and Bold italic sans: bold and slanted, for a word you want to stress.
• Bold cursive and Bold gothic: for a name or a heading rather than a whole sentence.

Bold letters with accents

Lowercase letters keep their accents: ñ, é and ç come out bold with the mark still on them, so words like "ação" and "mañana" read right. Capitals with a mark on top, such as Á or Ñ, stay plain, because common fonts don't show the mark over a bold capital. Letters from other alphabets, such as Greek or Cyrillic, stay as they are.

Apps that already have bold

Some apps can make a message bold on their own. There, use their way, because it stays normal text that screen readers and search understand:

• Discord: put two asterisks before and after the words in a message. See Discord fonts for the rest of its formatting.
• WhatsApp: put one asterisk before and after the words. See WhatsApp fonts.
• Names and bios: these usually take no formatting at all, so copied bold letters are the way to go. The same goes for most Facebook posts and comments, which have no bold button.

Where bold text costs more

Some apps count each bold letter as two characters. On X, a bold letter costs 2 of a post's 280, so "Hello world" in Bold uses 21 instead of 11. Twitter fonts shows that count for every style as you type.

Usernames and handles, the part after the @, usually allow only plain letters, numbers and a few signs, so bold letters won't go there. Use them in your display name instead.

Bold a word, not a paragraph

Screen readers often read bold letters one by one by their character names, or skip them, and search inside an app may not find a bold word. Make a name, a heading or one key word bold, and keep the rest of your text plain.

Every other style, from cursive to bubble letters, is in the full list of copy and paste fonts.