Plenty of apps won’t let you choose a font, but they’ll happily accept any text you paste, including special characters. That’s the trick behind fancy text. Type a name, a caption or a bio above and you’ll see it rewritten in more than twenty decorative styles, each with a copy button.
How it works
Unicode, the standard that defines the characters computers can show, contains a lot more than the everyday alphabet. It includes whole sets of mathematical letters in bold, italic, script and gothic forms, circled letters, squared letters, fullwidth letters and more. They were created for mathematics and typography, but they look like letters in a different font, so people use them to style text.
This generator replaces each ordinary letter in your text with its look-alike in the chosen set. Spaces, punctuation and anything without a styled version are left alone. Because the result is plain text, it works anywhere you can paste text: social media bios, captions, usernames, chat messages, documents and more.
The styles you’ll see
Bold, italic and bold italic give emphasis in places that offer no formatting buttons. Script and bold script mimic handwriting. Fraktur and bold fraktur have a gothic, old-newspaper look. Double-struck is the outlined style you’ll recognise from mathematics. Sans, sans bold, sans italic and monospace give clean alternatives, with monospace looking like typewriter or code text.
Circled, squared and negative squared letters sit inside shapes and look like badges or keys. Fullwidth letters are wide, spaced and popular for a retro aesthetic. Small caps give tiny capital letters in place of lowercase. Strikethrough and underline are added with invisible combining marks. Upside down flips the text, which you can explore more in our upside down text tool. Spaced out puts a space between every letter.
Where it works, and where it doesn’t
It works well in places that accept Unicode text and don’t restrict characters: most social networks, messaging apps, bios and profile names, and documents. It may not work in places that filter characters, such as some usernames, passwords or forms, and some systems replace unusual characters on sight.
A few caveats are worth knowing before you use it widely.
Accessibility. Screen readers often don’t cope well with these characters. Some read out each letter’s long official name, for example “mathematical bold capital h”, and others skip them. For a person who relies on a screen reader, a long fancy caption can be very hard to follow. Use fancy text for short decorative touches, never for essential information.
Search. Styled letters are different characters from normal ones. Search engines and platform search generally won’t match a fancy “Hello” with a plain “Hello”. Keep hashtags, keywords and anything meant to be found in ordinary text.
Missing characters. Older devices and some apps lack fonts for the rarer styles and show empty boxes. If you’re sending something to many people, test it on a different device first.
Not true fonts. Because these are characters rather than a font, they can’t cover every letter style, and accented or non-Latin letters usually aren’t styled at all.
Making the most of it
Keep it short. A styled name or a single bold phrase reads well; a paragraph of script is tiring. Mix styles sparingly, since two or three together look deliberate and ten look chaotic. Decorate with emoji if you like: the emoji repeater quickly builds borders and dividers. If you need to flip the case of your text before styling, the case converter will do it. And to see how long your caption is before posting, drop it in the word counter.
Our article on how fancy text fonts work goes into more detail about the Unicode behind it and the accessibility trade-offs.
Single styles with more detail
Each of the popular styles has its own page with notes on where it works and where it does not: cursive, gothic, bold, bubble, strikethrough, underline, wide and mirror text. If you decide you want plain text back, remove special characters with the ASCII option strips most of these styles, though it also removes accents.