Italic text generator

Style opens on Italic. Switch it to Bold italic if the thin slant 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.

Aldus Manutius was printing pocket-sized classics in Venice and wanted more words on a page. In 1500 his punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut a sloped, narrow type modeled on the handwriting of the papal chancery, and the first whole book set in it was a 1501 Virgil.

It was a body type, for fitting whole books into fewer pages. 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 come from somewhere else. They're mathematical variables, and in a formula the slant means "this is a quantity".

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. Bold, double-struck and monospace are the styles 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.