Italic text generator

Type on the left and the slanted version appears on the right. Style adds a bold italic if the plain one disappears against its background.

Swap the boxes to get ordinary letters back.

This page exists for places that give you no formatting at all: an Instagram bio, a form field, a job listing, a review box. Where a real italic exists, use it.

Discord takes *asterisks* and turns them into proper italic text that a screen reader still reads as words. So does Reddit, and so does anything built on Markdown. Pasting these characters there instead would look the same and read as nonsense to anyone not using their eyes.

It's worth being blunt about that, because "it works everywhere" is the reason people reach for this and the reason it's sometimes the wrong tool.

Aldus Manutius was printing pocket-sized classics in Venice and wanted more words on a page. In 1501 his punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut a sloped, narrow type modelled on the handwriting of the papal chancery, and the first book set in it was an edition of Virgil.

It was a space-saving body type rather than an emphasis mark. Using italic to stress a word came later, once roman and italic started appearing together on the same page.

The characters this tool hands you are not that. They're mathematical variables, where slant means "this is a quantity" rather than "say this louder".

One letter is missing from the italic run. Unicode had already encoded an italic h at U+210E, as the Planck constant, so the block skips it rather than encoding the same shape twice.

The tool substitutes it, which means "high" comes out whole. Numbers, though, stay upright: there are no italic digits in the block.

Bold is the same block one style along, and the only one of these with digits. Cursive slants further and reads as handwriting rather than emphasis.

For emphasis that isn't a slant, strikethrough draws a line through instead.