WhatsApp font generator

Search, hashtags and mentions stop matching

Search inside a network matches the characters that were stored. A styled word will not come back for the plain word, so a post styled from top to bottom is a post that is harder to find. The same rule breaks tags and handles: a styled hashtag is a different string from the plain one, so it does not join the plain tag's results, and a styled @ mention does not attach to the account.

The mention is the more expensive of the two, since it fails in front of the person you meant to credit and nothing tells either of you. In your own draft it looks exactly right. Keep tags and handles in plain characters and style the words around them.

A link goes the same way and goes further. Style the characters of a URL and it stops being a URL, so the network never turns it into a link, nothing is clickable, and anyone who wants the page has to retype it out of characters their keyboard cannot produce. Leave every address alone and style the sentence introducing it.

How much length the styling costs

Most of these characters sit far outside the basic Latin range, and a network that counts in code units charges more for them than for the letter you typed. The character counter on this site measures in whatever unit each network named, so paste the styled version there rather than the plain one.

There is no multiplier you can apply in your head, because the size of the cost depends on which unit the network chose. What is consistent is the direction. A line that was comfortable in plain text can be over the ceiling once every letter in it has been swapped.

Styling that disappears on the way in

Some networks normalise or strip unusual characters when a post comes in, so the styling can vanish on the way, or land as boxes on a device whose fonts have no glyph for that block. This is why the last step is always to look at the published post rather than the composer.

Fields inside one network are handled by separate code, so a style that survives in a post can be stripped from a bio or a display name on the same account. Check the field you are actually publishing into, and check it from a second device, since the glyphs your machine has are not the glyphs everyone has.

Weigh what a failure costs before you style a field. A post scrolls away, so a style that breaks there costs you one post. A bio, a display name or a pinned post is the version of your account every new visitor meets, and it sits there failing for months before anyone mentions it. The handle is the one field to leave alone in every case, because it is the string people type to find you.

What happens when someone copies your line

Styled text travels as the characters it is made of. Somebody who quotes your line into a document, a support ticket or a search box gets mathematical characters, and a spellchecker will underline the lot. Anyone retyping it types the plain letters, which no longer match what you posted.

It follows that a styled line is a bad home for anything a reader needs to reuse: a discount code, a command, a file name, a handle, a date they will paste into a calendar. Style the label above those things and leave the thing itself alone.

Script and cursive text

Mathematical Script is the closest Unicode gets to a cursive hand, and it is the style people ask for by name, usually for a bio line or a sign-off. It is also the one missing the most letters, which makes the word Hello in script the fastest test of whether a generator was built carefully.

Script has no digits and no styled punctuation, so a year or a price stays in plain type in the middle of a cursive line. At feed size the thin strokes are the first thing to go, particularly on a phone outdoors, so a whole sentence in script gets read as a shape rather than as words.

Fraktur and blackletter

Fraktur is the blackletter style, the dense angular type used for German printing into the twentieth century and still used on newspaper mastheads. Unicode encoded it for mathematics, where a fraktur letter names a different kind of object from the italic one, which is the only reason it is available to paste into a bio at all.

Two things before you use it. Five capitals live outside the block, so a careless generator drops C, H, I, R or Z. And blackletter capitals are hard to decode for anyone who has not read them before, even when every glyph renders. One short word works. A sentence does not.

Double-struck and outline letters

Double-struck, also called blackboard bold, is the outline look mathematicians use for the sets of numbers. In a feed it reads as hollow or airy text, which is why people reach for it.

Font coverage is thinner here than for bold or italic, so this is among the styles most likely to arrive as empty rectangles on somebody's device. Seven capitals sit outside the block. It does carry its own digits, which most of the decorative styles do not.

Italic, and the lowercase h that is not in the block

Mathematical Italic is the sloped serif style and the quietest thing on this page. Bold shouts. Italic reads as a change of tone, which makes it the better pick for a title line you would rather not shout.

It has exactly one hole, lowercase h, which Unicode had already encoded as the Planck constant before the block existed. That single gap is enough to break the words this, the and other in a naive generator, which is most English sentences. Italic has no digits either.

One convention is worth borrowing from print. Italic marks a title or a quotation, so the name of a book, a film or a line taken from somebody else reads correctly in it without any quotation marks around it. That is the rare case where the styling carries meaning rather than volume, which makes it easier to justify than emphasis for its own sake.

Bold serif and bold sans

Bold is the style that behaves, which is why it has its own tool on this site with the full account of where it survives and what it breaks. The short version: both bold runs carry digits, they have the widest font coverage of anything here, and the sans version sits close to the interface font most networks use, so it reads as emphasis rather than as a special effect.

If you are only ever going to use one style, use this one, in one position, on posts that belong together.

Monospace

Monospace gives every character the same width, the way a code editor does. It suits a command, a file name, a key format or anything a reader might otherwise mistake for ordinary prose, because the shape of the line says this part is literal.

It has the most defensible use of anything on this page and the same accessibility cost as the rest, so when the reader has to type what you wrote, put the plain version somewhere in the post as well.

Small caps

Small caps is capital letterforms at roughly lowercase height. It reads as a quiet emphasis, useful on a label or a category word at the head of a line. It is assembled from phonetic-alphabet letters that happen to have the right shape, so it is a costume rather than a typographic feature.

Unicode has no small-cap q and no small-cap x, so those two stay exactly as typed and stand slightly taller than the rest of the word. A word with an x in it gives the trick away. Everything else in the alphabet is covered.

Full width

Full width comes from CJK typesetting, where a Latin letter has to occupy the same square cell as a Chinese character so that columns line up. Dropped into a Latin sentence, that cell reads as text stretched out with air between the letters.

It is the look people associate with vaporwave, and it is expensive in room, since every letter is a separate code point outside the basic range and the spacing is doing the job of characters you never typed.

Circled and squared letters

Circled letters come from Enclosed Alphanumerics, a block Unicode added for list markers and diagram labels. Squared letters come from its supplement and cover capitals only, so lowercase stays as typed and a mixed-case word comes out uneven.

Both have thin font coverage, which puts them near the front of the queue to arrive as boxes on someone else's screen. They also read slowly, because the eye decodes them one shape at a time. A marker or two at the start of a line is the honest use.

Upside down text

Upside down text is built from look-alike characters scattered across several Latin and phonetic blocks, then reversed, so the line reads correctly when the screen is turned around. The letters have nothing to do with the ones you typed. An upside down n is a real u.

Nothing survives except the joke. Search will not find it, a screen reader gets a run of nonsense, and a few characters have no rotated twin so they stay the right way up. Treat it as a novelty and it is fine.

Strikethrough and underline

These two work differently from everything else here. No letter is replaced. A combining mark goes in after each character, a long stroke overlay for strikethrough and a low line for underline, and the mark draws on top of the letter before it.

Because your letters are untouched, search still matches them and a screen reader still reads your words, which makes these the two safest styles on the page. The cost moves to length, since every character now carries a second code point, and to rendering: some fonts draw a continuous line and others leave gaps between the letters.