Text tools
Unicode styling, Discord formatting and timestamps. Everything copies as text, so it survives a paste into any app.
Which generator does what
Five of these turn what you type into a different set of Unicode characters. The two Discord pages do something else, writing markup and tags that Discord itself renders.
That difference matters when you go to paste. A generator hands you characters, and characters render anywhere text renders. The Discord pages hand you syntax, which only becomes formatting once Discord reads it, so the same string pasted into an unrelated app shows its raw markup instead.
- Cursive font generator
Script shapes for a bio. Every cursive variant appears at the same time, which matters because most people do not know which one they want until they see it next to the others.
- Gothic font generator
Fraktur and blackletter, for a gaming tag or a band name that has to read heavy at ten characters without needing a logo file.
- Small text generator
Superscript characters, for a caption or an aside that should look smaller than the text around it in an app offering no size control at all.
- Glitch text generator
Combining marks stacked over ordinary letters, so a creepypasta title looks corrupted while the text still copies and pastes as text.
- Ambigram generator
Upside-down letters applied to a reversed string. The mapping is kept apart from the other tables so it cannot corrupt them.
- Discord text formatting
Discord's own markup, written for you as you type rather than looked up in a syntax table and assembled by hand.
- Discord timestamp generator
Pick a moment and get the tag Discord renders in each reader's own time zone, which is the point of using one instead of typing a time out.
How a letter becomes a styled character
Every style on these pages is a lookup table. A letter you type is swapped for a Unicode code point that happens to be shaped like script, or blackletter, or a tiny capital. Nothing is rendered as an image and no font file is downloaded, and that is the whole reason the shapes survive a paste into an app that has never heard of this site.
A font works the other way round. It changes how text looks on your own machine and does nothing once that text lands somewhere else, because the person reading it does not have the file. Anyone who needs a .ttf for a design tool should go to a font site, since none of these pages will help with that.
Upside-down text has its own letter-swap mapping, b to q and 6 to 9 and so on, applied to a reversed string. It is kept separate from the other tables on purpose, because folding it in would corrupt them.
Glitch text stacks combining marks above and below normal letters. The letters underneath stay ordinary characters, so the output is still text and still pastes as text into a field that accepts text.
Where styled Unicode falls down
- Screen readers either skip these characters or read them as nonsense. They are decoration, and they are the wrong choice for anything a person needs to hear.
- Several Unicode style blocks have holes in their letter coverage. A letter with no mapped shape is left plain rather than swapped for a lookalike, so a styled run can visibly mix two type styles. Script and Fraktur both borrow their missing letters from Letterlike Symbols, drawn by different hands years apart.
- Glitch text inflates dramatically in character count, because each visible letter carries several invisible marks. A field with a character limit will cut it off far earlier than the visible text suggests.
- Blackletter is hard to read at small sizes even when it renders correctly, so a long sentence in Fraktur turns into a wall.
- Sign-up forms and username fields often strip anything outside plain ASCII, and they rarely say why. Discord's newer unique usernames are lowercase ASCII only, though server nicknames and display names still take styled characters.
- No font file is downloaded here, so a character that shows up as an empty box is one the device you are looking at has no glyph for. The same string can render correctly on somebody else's phone, which is worth testing before a name goes on a profile.
