Bold and italic text
Unicode bold, italic and monospace for networks with no formatting button, with a straight answer about what it costs you.
0 characters will change
What these characters cost you
- Screen readers struggle.These are maths symbols that look like letters, so they are announced wrongly or one at a time. NVDA added an opt-in setting in its 2024.3 release for exactly these characters; it is off by default and it is NVDAโs alone.
- Hashtags and mentions break. Styled characters are a different string, so the tag stops being a tag and the handle stops linking.
- Search misses it. Someone searching the plain word generally will not match the styled one.
Bold
Italic
Bold italic
Sans-serif bold
Sans-serif italic
Monospace
Script
Fraktur
Double-struck
What styled text costs
Styled
A styled #hashtag is a different string, so it stops being the tag anyone follows. A styled @mention stops resolving. A styled keyword stops matching search.
Plain
Style a few words for emphasis and leave hashtags, mentions and the words you want found as ordinary text. That is what the warnings above are watching for.
These characters are Unicode maths letters, not formatting, so a screen reader has no letter to announce and falls back to spelling the line out. NVDA added a normalisation option in 2024.3 written for exactly these characters, but it is opt-in and it is one reader. Anyone on VoiceOver, JAWS or a braille display gets the raw characters.
Common questions
- Is this real bold text?
- No, and that is the point. These are Unicode mathematical symbols that happen to look bold. Nothing is formatted: the letters are swapped for different characters.
- Do screen readers read this properly?
- Often not. NVDA added an opt-in normalisation option in 2024.3 written for exactly these characters, but it is off by default and it is one reader. VoiceOver, JAWS and braille users get the raw symbols.
- Why did my hashtag stop working?
- A styled hashtag is a different string, so the platform no longer recognises it as the same tag. The same goes for @mentions. Style your words and leave tags and handles plain.
- Can people still find styled text in search?
- Generally no. Search matches characters, and these are different characters. If a word is the reason someone would find the post, leave it plain.
- Why are my numbers and accented letters unchanged?
- Because no styled version of them exists. The italic, script and fraktur blocks have no digits, and none cover letters like รฉ or รฑ. It leaves them alone rather than faking a lookalike.
Stop doing this by hand
Write the post once. Synapse publishes it to all nine networks on your schedule, with each oneโs rules already applied.
More free tools
- UTM link builderPaste one link and get a tagged URL for every network at once, so you can finally tell which platform sent the clicks.
- Hashtag setsSave the hashtag blocks you reuse, name them, and rotate between them instead of pasting the same twenty tags every time.
- Video specs checkerDrop in a video and see which formats it already fits (Reels, Shorts, TikTok, Stories or the feed) before you find out the hard way.