Styling plain text that survives copy-paste: a Unicode primer (and the tools I use)

The challenge lies in making text appear bold, italic, or in other styles when those formatting options are absent from plain-text fields. Consider this common situation: emphasizing a word in an Instagram bio, Discord nickname, Slack message, or a plain-text README file. Traditional tools like bold, italic, or superscript buttons are not present.

The reason is straightforward: these platforms store text in a plain format, without any formatting data. The presence of formatting is dependent on a rich-text editor. Once that editor is removed, the formatting no longer exists. The solution that travels with the text is Unicode. Unicode is not merely an expanded ASCII set; it comprises various letter variants, including bold, italic, script, fraktur, double-struck, and monospace styles.

For example, the letter 'x' can be represented as 𝐱 (bold), 𝑥 (italic), or 𝚡 (monospace). Similarly, the letter 'A' can be displayed as 𝔸 (double-struck) or 𝔄 (fraktur). The numeral '2' can be shown as ² (superscript), a feature derived from an older Unicode block. These stylized characters exist as distinct code points, ensuring their preservation when copied and pasted into any plain-text field.

This is the underlying principle behind "font generator" websites, which do not rely on actual fonts, but rather on codepoint lookups. However, there is a potential issue with these conversion tools. They often exhibit uneven coverage, meaning that certain stylized characters may not have a direct counterpart in Unicode. For instance, there may be no lowercase 'b' in superscript Unicode, or an italicized capital 'Q' may be absent.

Many converters attempt to cover these gaps by substituting lookalike characters from other scripts. While this might appear visually acceptable, it can cause problems for screen readers, search engines, or render the character as "tofu" (a term used to describe blank spaces in a document). A reliable converter, on the other hand, would perform a precise mapping of supported characters, leave unsupported characters untouched, and clearly indicate which characters remained unchanged.

After years of manually searching Unicode tables, I turned to LiteralKit, a collection of 50+ specialized Unicode tools. This free, browser-based solution caters to developers and offers three key advantages: It operates locally within the browser, ensuring no data transfer, no accounts, and no uploads. Paste your text, convert it, and copy it instantly.

The tool guarantees honest output, never substituting lookalike characters. Unsupported characters pass through unchanged, and the interface clearly indicates its coverage at the start. This level of honesty is crucial for developers, as it ensures the integrity of the text. With a single tool per page and one job per tool, LiteralKit eliminates unnecessary pop-ups and multi-step interfaces.

The toolset includes various options, such as Superscript Generator for footnote-style notation, Fancy Text Generator for italic, bold, script, and monospace styles, and Case Converter for text case adjustments. Additional tools, like Wingdings, Runic translators, symbol pickers, and symbol identifier, are also available in the tool directory.

In summary, styled plain text can be achieved through Unicode arithmetic. However, manually performing this arithmetic is inefficient. Understanding the existence of this trick, being aware of the honest gaps in coverage, and utilizing an appropriate tool to handle the mapping is the most efficient approach.