Italic Text Generator

The italic h

One letter in the serif italic style is special: the small h is ℎ (U+210E PLANCK CONSTANT). When Unicode created its mathematical italic letters, the italic h already existed as the physics symbol for Planck's constant, so Unicode reuses it. We do the same, which is why you never get a box in its place.

No italic numbers

Unicode has bold, double-struck, sans-serif and monospace digits, but no italic ones, so numbers stay upright in the italic styles.

When real italics are better

Discord makes real italics with *one asterisk* or _underscores_, and WhatsApp with _underscores_. Use those inside messages; use Unicode italics where there's no formatting, like bios and names.

Before you paste

It's different text, not just a different look. To a computer, 𝒽ℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ is not the word hello. Keep the words people search for (your name, your shop, your username) in plain letters.

Screen readers may stumble. They can announce each styled letter by its Unicode name (“mathematical bold capital H”) or skip it, which makes the text hard to follow for people who rely on them. Use styles for a few words, not for whole paragraphs.

It can count double. Many styled letters (all the cursive, bold, italic and gothic ones) live outside the first 65,536 Unicode characters, so they take two UTF-16 code units. Web forms that limit length with the HTML maxlength attribute count those units, and X counts these letters as two characters each toward its 280-character limit.