![]() There are a few different bold alphabets within the Unicode standard. You can't copy and paste a bold font, but you can of course copy textual characters (like those produced by this generator) as you please. You can copy and paste the bold characters because they're actually bold characters rather than just styled "normal" characters. So there we have it! I hope that little bit of trivia was interesting to you, and that it's now at least a little bit more clear why the this isn't so much a "bold font generator" as a "bold unicode text generator". So in other words, Unicode was focussed on being friendly to the people that it needed adoption from. The eventual result of this is a metaphorical explosion of of the spec, which now encodes over 100,000 different characters, including those of almost every language, all the emojis, and, importantly, a few different "altered" Latin alphabets - which includes a few bold ones!īut why include bold characters in the spec? Why not just let developers use HTML, CSS, and separate font files to style the text in their applications? Two reasons: (1) HTML and CSS didn't come about until the late 80s, and (2) It was a bunch of extra effort if you just wanted a simple way to format text in a simple messaging application/protocol (like email!). Unicode needed to "please" everyone if it was going to get fast adoption, so the most practical route was to try to make as many of the big players happy as possible. Okay, well that might be a bit of hyperbole, but there is some truth to it. The result? Mash all of the specifications together into one giant monstrosity that catered to everyone's needs. They had a lot of work to do, and they didn't want it to take decades to get everyone using Unicode. So how was Unicode going to cater to everyone's needs? They couldn't just put up a list of binary->ASCII codes and call it a day. There were dozens of specifications out there in the wild already (public and private), and each of them had a lot of users, and many of the specifications were mainly for use in languages other than English. You see, Unicode had quite a task on its hands. Okay, so what does this all have to do with bold text? Well, we're getting there. Well, in the early 1980s, a group of employees from a bunch of large tech companies came together to try to create the "universal" code for converting binary (zeros and ones) into text characters (like the ones you're reading right now). Why couldn't everyone just speak the same language? That would make everything a lot easier. But as you might imagine, this becomes cumbersome. The solution to all this was to create "translators" between the different formats, just like you would do in a conversation between people of different languages. And so it was as if everyone in a conversation was speaking a different language. So there'd be another programmer who's program interpretted "000" as "A", and "001" as "B", etc. Easy! Except that every programmer had their own "codex". And then you can transmit messages by sending zeros and ones. So one programmer might say "001" means "A", "002" means "B", and so on. These need to be somehow converted into something meaningful. At the lowest level, computers transmit voltages (low/high, zero/one). See, if you're a programmer, and you wanted your program to interface (connect to, or talk to) another program, then you need some sort of shared language. As computer usage increased, and as the early internet emerged, this became a problem. Typography was a well-established field, but it hadn't yet made its way past the type-writer and into the digital realm. In the early days of computing, there was no agreed-upon way of representing and rendering text in computer programs. Interested in how all this text font conversion stuff works? Let's take a dive into the origins of Unicode - the International not-for-profit organisation that creates the rules for how computers should convert binary (zeros and ones) into textual characters (like the ones you're reading now). They're actually different characters/symbols - not just different "styles" or "fonts". Think of these bold characters as separate "glyphs", just like "A" is different to "a", and "%" is different to "$". ![]() That's why it's possible to copy and paste them (something that you can't do with normal "fonts"). The characters that are generated aren't actually a bold "font", but rather a set of bold Unicode characters. Hi there! Ever wondered how people make text bold on their social media posts/bios when there aren't any formatting buttons? Well, this little web app allows you to convert normal text into bold text that you can copy and paste into your social media posts/bio/etc.
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