Italic text generator

Italic is the quietest way to change how a line of text feels. A slant reads as emphasis, or as an aside, or as a title, and it does all that without the shouting that bold or fullwidth text brings with it. Because there is no italic button in a profile bio or a comment box, the only way to get a slant into those fields is to use characters that are already drawn slanted, which is what this page produces.

Mathematical Italic starts at U+1D434 and it has exactly one hole, which is a strange and specific one: there is no italic lowercase h in the block. The slot where it should be is empty because that character was already encoded years earlier as U+210E, the Planck constant, sitting in Letterlike Symbols. It is the same glyph doing double duty. Generators that ignore this produce a gap in the middle of common words, so a word as common as the comes out with a box where the h should be. FontVibe substitutes the Planck constant character, which is visually the italic h you wanted.

There is no italic set of digits anywhere in Unicode, so numbers pass through as they are. This looks fine in a sentence and slightly odd in something like a date where the letters slant and the numbers stand upright. If that bothers you, the sans-serif italic alphabet at U+1D608 pairs reasonably with plain digits because the letterforms are simpler, or you can slant nothing and use small caps instead.

Worth knowing: the sans-serif italic and sans-serif bold italic alphabets are both complete, with no missing letters at all. Only the serif italic has the h problem. So if you want a guarantee that nothing will break, use one of the sans versions. The visual difference is real but subtle at bio sizes, and sans italic tends to sit more naturally inside the sans-serif interfaces that most apps use.

People often arrive here wanting italic and actually wanting cursive, so it is worth drawing the line. Italic is upright letterforms leaning over, with the same basic skeleton as roman type. Script is a different set of shapes altogether, modelled on handwriting, with loops and flourishes. Italic is what you use for a book title. Script is what you use when you want your bio to look decorative. Both are on this site and the two alphabets are unrelated in Unicode, coming from different ranges with different gaps.

Common questions

Why does my h look slightly different from the other letters?

Because it is a different character. There is no italic lowercase h in the mathematical block, so the Planck constant glyph stands in. In most fonts the two are drawn by the same designer and match perfectly. In a few, the h sits a hair lighter than its neighbours.

Can I italicise numbers?

No. Unicode never encoded italic digits, so they stay upright in every generator. If you need the whole string to look consistent, consider typewriter style, which covers letters and digits in one matched set.

What is the difference between italic and cursive here?

They are separate Unicode alphabets. Italic is slanted roman type and stays fairly readable. Script is based on handwriting, is more decorative, and has eight missing capitals that have to be sourced from another block. Pick italic for emphasis and script for atmosphere.

Does italic text work in Discord messages?

It does, but Discord already supports italic through its own markup, and using that is better: it renders consistently, it is searchable, and screen readers cope with it. Save Unicode italic for nicknames, channel names and status text, where markup is not parsed.

See also

• Bold text generator
• Cursive font generator
• Small caps generator