fancy-text

Map plain ASCII to Unicode "font" styles — bold, italic, script, fraktur, small caps, upside down and ten more. Zero dependencies, no DOM, ~150 lines.

There is no such thing as a bold font in a plain-text field. What tools like this actually do is swap each letter for a different Unicode code point that happens to look bold — mostly from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. That is why the result survives a copy-paste into a bio, a chat message or a filename, and also why a screen reader will read 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 as "mathematical bold small b, …". Use it for a display name, not for body text.

This is the engine behind the Toolerax fancy text generator, pulled out as a standalone module.

Install

npm install @toolerax/fancy-text

Use

import { stylize, stylizeAll, FANCY_STYLES } from "@toolerax/fancy-text";

stylize("Toolerax", "bold");        // 𝐓𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐱
stylize("Toolerax", "smallCaps");   // Tᴏᴏʟᴇʀᴀx
stylize("Toolerax", "upsideDown");  // xɐɹǝloo⊥

// Render every style at once — for a "pick one" list.
stylizeAll("hi");
// [{ id: "bold", label: "Bold", text: "𝐡𝐢" }, …]

// Or drive the style table yourself.
FANCY_STYLES.map((s) => s.id);

Styles

id	Label	Toolerax 123
bold	Bold	𝐓𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐱 𝟏𝟐𝟑
italic	Italic	𝑇𝑜𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑥 123
boldItalic	Bold Italic	𝑻𝒐𝒐𝒍𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒙 123
script	Script (cursive)	𝒯ℴℴ𝓁ℯ𝓇𝒶𝓍 123
boldScript	Bold Script	𝓣𝓸𝓸𝓵𝓮𝓻𝓪𝔁 123
fraktur	Fraktur (gothic)	𝔗𝔬𝔬𝔩𝔢𝔯𝔞𝔵 123
doubleStruck	Double-struck (outline)	𝕋𝕠𝕠𝕝𝕖𝕣𝕒𝕩 𝟙𝟚𝟛
monospace	Monospace	𝚃𝚘𝚘𝚕𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚡 𝟷𝟸𝟹
sansBold	Sans-serif Bold	𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘅 𝟭𝟮𝟯
circled	Circled	Ⓣⓞⓞⓛⓔⓡⓐⓧ ①②③
squared	Squared	🅃🄾🄾🄻🄴🅁🄰🅇 123
fullwidth	Fullwidth (vaporwave)	Ｔｏｏｌｅｒａｘ　１２３
smallCaps	Small Caps	Tᴏᴏʟᴇʀᴀx 123
upsideDown	Upside Down	ƐᄅƖ xɐɹǝloo⊥
strikethrough	Strikethrough	T̶o̶o̶l̶e̶r̶a̶x̶ 1̶2̶3̶
underline	Underline	T̲o̲o̲l̲e̲r̲a̲x̲ 1̲2̲3̲

Rows where 123 comes out unchanged are not bugs — Unicode has no italic, script or fraktur digits, so they are left alone rather than faked from another block.

Background on why any of this works: How fancy text actually works.

Behaviour worth knowing

• Anything unmapped passes through unchanged. Accented letters, CJK, punctuation and emoji come out as they went in.
• Iteration is by code point, so surrogate pairs are never split — 🙂 survives every style.
• smallCaps deliberately leaves uppercase alone. The small-caps block only covers lowercase; faking the rest would look worse than leaving it.
• upsideDown reverses the string as well as flipping each glyph, which is what makes it read correctly when the reader turns their head.
• Combining styles skip whitespace. strikethrough and underline append a combining mark (U+0336 / U+0332), and adding one to a space produces a stray floating bar in most fonts.
• Rendering is the font's problem, not this library's. Some of these blocks are patchy in system fonts, and squared in particular renders as emoji-style tiles on some platforms and flat boxes on others.

API

Export	Signature
stylize	(text: string, id: string) => string — throws RangeError on an unknown id
stylizeAll	(text: string) => Array<{ id, label, text }>
applyStyle	(text: string, style: StyleDef) => string — for a hand-built style
getStyle	(id: string) => StyleDef | undefined
FANCY_STYLES	StyleDef[] — every style, in display order
StyleDef	the style-definition type

Develop

npm install
npm test     # builds, then runs the node:test suite

Licence

MIT © Toolerax