Bold Text Generator (𝙘𝙤𝙥𝙮 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝙥𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚)

Hello! This generator converts your normal next into bold text which you can copy and paste into your Instagram bio, and into many of social media places. You might have seen someone else's post/bio on some social media platform and noticed that they've somehow managed to make bold text, even though no formatting options seem to be available when you try to do the same. Well, they way they did it is by using a generator like this.

So how does it all work? Let's find out...

As it turns out, you can't copy and paste fonts per se, but you can copy textual characters. For example, if you try to copy and paste this string: "aaaAAA", you will be successful. The "a" and "A" characters are actually separate characters, and not just different "stylings" of the same character. But here you'll be unsuccessful: "aaaaaa" because the bold "a" characters have been styled using a thing called CSS. They're actually the same character "underneath". BUT, as it turns out, there are separate characters in the Unicode standard which look just like the normal alphabet, except that they are bolder! Here, you'll be successful in your copy and paste: "aaa𝗮𝗮𝗮". That's because those bold "a" characters aren't just "styled" versions of the normal "a" - they're separate glyphs!

But why? Because Unicode.

Unicode is an international computing industry "standards" organisation that gets together every now and then and decides what new textual characters are needed in the world. This includes emojis, since they are technically text!

It all began in the early 1980s when people realised that it would be a lot easier if everyone agreed upon the way to store text in a binary (zeros and ones) format. Computers don't actually save the graphical glyphs when you save your text file to your harddrive - instead, they convert each character to a string of binary digits (like 01100001, for example), and then they save those "bits" to the harddrive. Later, when you want to read that text file, you open it up, and the computer converts it back to the graphical representation for you. You can convert text to binary here, if you're interested. So the problem was, people couldn't agree on a single set of conversion rules, and so all the programmers were making their own binary-to-text translators, and it was all very cumbersome if you wanted your program to interact with another program (e.g. across a network) which used a different binary "language".

So that's where Unicode came in. But they had to introduce a lot of glyphs, because they needed to convince everyone that it was worth switching to their "universal code" (uni... code...), and everyone had their own set of character types that they really needed. Mathematicians were primarily responsible for requesting the set of bold, italic, etc. alphabets, because their equations required bold characters.

But why not just rely on something like CSS, or different fonts to style your equations? Well, for one, to copy and paste fonts, you'd need to actually copy and paste the whole font file too. Including bold text in the standard allowed people to easily share their equations with a simple copy paste.

And so there you have it. The computing industry gave you Unicode, and Mathematicians (and a few other academic fields) gave you bold text alphabets!

As you've noticed, there's not just one bold alphabet. There are quite a few! That's because different types of bold text was required to represent different things. If mathematicians tended to use a fancy "Fraktur" (medieval-looking) bold character to represent a particular abstract mathematical object, then it was inconvenient to come up with a different representation in the digital world. So Unicode gave them what they wanted. Similarly, we got bold italic text from Unicode, and serif/sans-serif variations on both bold and bold italic text.

So I hope this bold text generator is useful to you! Most social media sites should allow you to use these bold text in some place or another, but certain sites to limit the usage - I guess to prevent people spamming bold text to try to stand out a lot. For example, Instagram doesn't allow bold text in posts, but they allow it in your bio. If you're unsure what's possible on your social media platform of choice, just make some bold text with this converter, and then give it a shot!

If you have any ideas for improving this generator, please leave them in the comments below. 𝕿𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖐𝖘!

P.S. You might also like to check out boldtext.io which is a site dedicated to creating all sorts of different bold text fonts (and other text fonts too!)