Every character has a number
Unicode gives each character a number: capital A, a Greek alpha, a smiley. Fonts are the pictures your device draws for those numbers. Normally a font change redraws the same characters in another design.
Where the styles come from
- Bold, italic, script, gothic, double-struck, sans-serif and typewriter letters come from a block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, made for maths.
- Bubbles and boxed letters come from enclosed alphanumerics.
- Wide text comes from fullwidth forms, made for East Asian text.
- Small caps and tiny letters come from phonetic extensions and modifier letters.
- Strikethrough and underline use combining marks that attach to the letter before them.
What a generator does
It reads each letter you type and replaces it with the matching character from one of those sets. A for A becomes a bold A, or a script A, or a circled A. Nothing about the page is restyled. The text itself is different.
What that means
- It travels. Copy and paste carries the style anywhere that accepts the characters.
- It cannot be resized or recoloured on its own. It takes the size and colour of the text around it.
- It is not searchable as normal text. A search for your name will not match the styled version.
- It can be unreadable to a screen reader, and may show as boxes on devices that lack a font for it.
Not a font
A font is a file that changes how text looks. Fancy text changes what the text is. For a real font change, use the font controls in the app. This page covers the vocabulary.