Instagram font generator

How to make styled text for your Instagram bio

The tool restyles whatever you type and leaves everything it has no mapping for alone, so the safe way to use it is a word at a time rather than a whole profile pasted in and pasted back.

1. 1Type or paste the words you want styled, not your whole profile. Anything without a mapping, spaces, punctuation, emoji, is passed through unchanged.
2. 2Compare the rows. Bold is the most widely supported; script is the hardest to read and circled is the likeliest to be filtered out, and the note under each row says so.
3. 3Copy the row you want and paste it into your Instagram bio.
4. 4Leave your handle out of it, and leave anything you want found in search plain. Only the Name field and the bio will take these characters at all.
5. 5Open your profile in a browser where you are not signed in, on a different device if you have one. That is the version other people get, and it is where missing characters turn into empty rectangles.
6. 6Check the finished bio in the app and in a browser. They do not use the same fonts, and a character that renders on one can be an empty box on the other.

What survives in a Instagram bio, and what it costs

The blocks these characters come from were added to Unicode for mathematics, phonetics and Japanese typesetting, and every one of them has gaps. Here is what is actually available, and where an Instagram profile will and will not take it.

• Italic and bold italic have no digits anywhere in their range. Type a number and it stays plain, however the letters around it look.
• The script and double-struck alphabets are not continuous runs. Letters such as the script B, E, H and L and the double-struck C, H, R and Z live in a separate block, so a generator that simply adds an offset lands on unassigned code points and produces empty boxes. This one uses the real characters.
• Small caps are phonetic letters rather than a style, and Unicode has no small-cap s or x, so those two letters stay lowercase in every word you run through it.
• Your handle cannot be styled at all. Instagram allows only lowercase letters, numbers, full stops and underscores there, so the Name field and the 150 character bio are the only places any of this can go.
• Instagram matches search against the characters you typed, not against what they look like. A styled Name field takes the account out of the results for its own name.
• A hashtag or an @mention written in styled characters is a different string, so it never becomes a link. A bio built that way looks right and quietly points nowhere.
• Emoji, accented letters and punctuation have no mapping and pass through untouched, so an accented name sits plain in the middle of a styled line and the whole thing looks half finished.

What breaks when you style a Instagram profile

The failures here are quiet. Nothing is rejected on screen, your own phone renders it perfectly, and a broken bio can sit there for months.

• Empty boxes: these characters need a font on the reader’s device that covers the block. Where it is missing, the visitor sees rectangles, and you never see it happen from your own account.
• Discovery: people find an Instagram account by typing a name into the search field. A styled name is not the string they are typing.
• Dead links: the hashtags and mentions that made your bio useful stop being tappable the moment they are restyled.
• Copying back out: someone who copies your bio to quote you or to look you up gets mathematical characters, which fail in every search box they paste them into.

When to leave the text plain

The useful version of this is small: one styled word, a divider between two lines, a symbol in front of a link. Everything a visitor has to read in order to decide whether to follow you stays plain.

• Never style the Name field if you want to be found by it.
• Never style opening hours, a price, a discount code or anything else a customer has to read back to you.
• If you would not put it on a shop sign, do not put it in a bio that is doing the same job.