Bold text

Michael Fuerst

Several web sites can convert plain text to bold, italic, etc. which can be then copied into Facebook. For example [REDACTED] If the NP++ encoding is set to UTF-16, some of the output from these converting web sites will appear as bold or italic when pasted into NP++.
However, this text will not retain its bold/italic if edited.
This suggests that bold or italic text could some how be directly typed into NP++

moderator cleaning out links to fancy text generators, as the existence of some links encourages spammers to try to most more links to competing sites. users can do their own web searches for online “fancy text generators” or similar phrasings

Coises

@Michael-Fuerst said in Bold text:

Several web sites can convert plain text to bold, italic, etc. which can be then copied into Facebook. For example https://capitalizemytitle.com/bold-text-generator/ If the NP++ encoding is set to UTF-16, some of the output from these converting web sites will appear as bold or italic when pasted into NP++.
However, this text will not retain its bold/italic if edited.
This suggests that bold or italic text could some how be directly typed into NP++

The way this website works is that it replaces your characters with Unicode characters in peculiar ranges. Thus, if you enter:
Show me.
into that website, you get back:
𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐦𝐞.

But those are not the letters S, h, o, w, etc. rendered in a bold font; they are different characters entirely. If you paste into this web site [LINK REDACTED] you’ll see the analysis — the letters are actually mathematical symbols.

So, when you edit and type using the keyboard, you’re typing ordinary letters, not these odd Unicode characters.

moderator cleaning out links to fancy text generators, as the existence of some links encourages spammers to try to most more links to competing sites. users can do their own web searches for online “fancy text generators” or similar phrasings

myfancytextgenerator

Yes, you can get bold/italic text directly into Notepad++. As Coises explained, those “bold” letters aren’t formatting at all; they’re ordinary Unicode characters from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. Notepad++ is a plain-text editor, so it can’t do rich-text bold, but it handles these Unicode characters like any other text — you can type, paste, search and replace them.

Two easy ways to insert them without a website:

Edit > Character Panel, then double-click the characters you want.
Type the character’s hex code point and press Alt+X to convert it (e.g. 1D44E for 𝑎).

If you’d rather convert longer passages in one go, a fancy text generator turns plain text into dozens of stylish Unicode fonts — bold, italic, script and more — ready to copy into Notepad++ or Facebook. Just keep in mind what Coises said: they’re still plain characters underneath, so editing them afterwards means retyping or regenerating that part.

moderator deleted spam link

PeterJones

@myfancytextgenerator ,

In your first few posts here, you didn’t post links, so despite your username, I hoped you were honestly here to talk about Notepad++. It appears I may be wrong.

But just in case, I am giving you grace for your one mistake.

This forum is not a place for getting the word out about your fancy text generator. Any more spam links from you, and you will be banned.

PeterJones

Please note: my removal of links above was not to claim that everyone who put in such a link was “spamming” the forum (though some may have been intended as spam); many of those links helped the original discussion prove a point, and were useful at the time. But what has happened is that bots/spammers keep seeing links to such sites, and trying to spam us with more links. We don’t want to become a link farm, so I have redacted the links, and users who are still curious can perform their own web searches to look for “fancy text generators” to generate the text or “unicode normalization” or “normalize unicode” to undo the fancy text, or use the new Unicode Normalize plugin, discussed here.