Valentine's Day font generator

Type a name or a message and copy the result. Letters switches between plain, cursive and bold cursive. Hearts go puts a heart between every letter, between words, either side of the line, or three each side, and Heart picks which one: the ♥ card suit, an outline ♡, the red emoji ❤️, two hearts 💕, a sparkling one 💖 or a floral ❦.

The cursive letters are real Unicode characters, not an image, so they paste into a card, a caption, a bio or a message and stay cursive. Swap the boxes to turn heart text back into plain letters.

Unicode has had hearts since its first versions. ♥ is the heart suit from a deck of cards, ♡ its outline, and ❤ a heavier heart from the Zapf Dingbats set, along with the floral ❦. They're ordinary text characters, so they take the colour of the text around them.

The emoji hearts came later: the coloured set 💙 💚 💛 💜 in Unicode 6.0, orange 🧡 in 10.0, white 🤍 and brown 🤎 in 12.0, and pink 🩷, light blue 🩵 and grey 🩶 in 15.0, released in September 2022. An older phone that hasn't caught up shows a newer one as an empty box.

The red ❤️ is a special case. It's the same character as the plain ❤, followed by an invisible selector, U+FE0F, which asks for the emoji drawing. Without it, some apps show a plain text heart instead. Picking ❤️ red above adds the selector for you.

Write their name in bold cursive with hearts either side for the front of a card. Put a message in pigpen inside it, and the key on a separate slip, or not at all if they like puzzles. Hide 12-15-22-5 somewhere they'll find it and see how long it takes them to work out it's A1Z26 for LOVE.

For a text, 143 says I love you in old pager code, and it's short enough to send without explanation to anyone who grew up with beepers. For anyone else, the explanation is half the fun.

The first recorded link between Saint Valentine's Day and romantic love is a poem, Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, from 1382, in which birds gather on Saint Valentine's day to choose their mates. The earliest valentine that survives was written by Charles, Duke of Orléans, to his wife while he was held in the Tower of London after his capture at Agincourt in 1415. The oldest in English is in the Paston Letters, from 1477, where Margery Brews calls her future husband "my right well-beloved Valentine".

Printed help arrived in 1797, when a British publisher brought out The Young Man's Valentine Writer, full of verses for anyone who couldn't write their own. By 1835, 60,000 valentines were sent by post in the United Kingdom, although postage was expensive. A generator like this one is the latest in a long line of help for people stuck on what to write.