Guides / How styled text works
How styled text works
Styled text looks like a font change. It is not one. The letters have been replaced by other characters that happen to look like a different design.
Every character has a number
Unicode gives every character a number: a capital A, a Greek alpha, a smiley. A font is a collection of pictures for those numbers. A normal font change redraws the same characters in a different design.
Where the styles live
- Bold, italic, script, gothic, double-struck, sans-serif and typewriter letters come from a block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, made for mathematics.
- Bubbles and boxed letters come from the enclosed alphanumerics.
- Wide text comes from the fullwidth forms made for East Asian text.
- Small capitals and tiny letters come from phonetic extensions and modifier letters.
- Strikethrough and underline are combining marks that attach to the letter before them.
What a generator does
It reads each letter you type and swaps in the matching character from one of those sets. The A becomes a bold A, a script A or a circled A. Nothing on the page is restyled. The text itself is different.
What follows
- It travels. Copy and paste carries the style anywhere those characters are accepted.
- It cannot be resized or recoloured by itself. It takes the size and colour of the text around it.
- It does not count as ordinary words for search.
- It can confuse a screen reader, and show as boxes where a font is missing.
Questions
Why does it work where there are no font options?
Because it is plain text. The style sits inside the characters, so anything that can show them shows the style.
Is it the same as emoji?
No. Emoji are pictures with their own characters. Styled text uses letters from other parts of Unicode, though a few boxed ones are also emoji.
Does it work for other languages?
The styles cover the English alphabet and digits. Other scripts and accented letters are left alone.