The BoldlyType Blog
Craft notes on writing for the internet — personal branding, GenZ tone, and platform-specific how-to.
Curated & edited by Shreyas Bagal.
Latest articles
WhatsApp Character Limit: About, Status, Message, and Group Limits (2026)
WhatsApp has a different limit for every field: About text tops out at 139 characters, a text status at 700, a group name at 100, a group description at 2,048, and a single message at roughly 65,536 — while the WhatsApp Business/Cloud API caps a text body at 4,096. This guide lays out every limit in one spec table, explains why most of these numbers are enforced in-app rather than published by WhatsApp, and flags the emoji-counting and fancy-font gotchas that quietly blow past the tightest fields.
YouTube Title Character Limit
A YouTube video title maxes out at 100 characters, but only about the first 70 are visible in desktop search and 40-55 on mobile before truncation. Here is every YouTube title, description, tag, and playlist limit for 2026 in one spec table, with the exact numbers and honest counting nuances.
Discord Character Limit
Discord's message limit is 2,000 characters, or 4,000 with full Nitro — but Nitro raises nothing else. Every other field, from the 32-character username to the ~190-character About Me bio and every embed limit, laid out in one spec table for 2026.
Instagram Bio Character Limit (2026): 150 Characters — Full Spec
Instagram gives you 150 characters for your bio — spaces, emojis and line breaks all count. Here's the full spec table for every profile field, plus how to check your length before you save.
Why Does Bold Text Work in My Caption but Not the Comment?
Bold pastes into your caption but breaks in the comment box because the two fields run on different input rules. Here's why Unicode styling survives one field and gets stripped by another — and how to make it stick.
How to Remove a Fancy Font from Your Instagram Bio
Looked for a "remove formatting" button in your Instagram bio and found nothing? There isn't one — the fancy look is Unicode look-alike characters, not formatting. Here's how to strip it: clear the field and retype plain letters, why deleting a few letters fails, and which parts to keep plain.
Why does my fancy font username say "invalid characters"?
Handles accept only plain letters, numbers and a few symbols, so pasted Unicode "fonts" get flagged as invalid characters. Here's why it happens, the username rules on Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn, and where styled text actually works.
Why do some letters stay normal in fancy text?
"Fancy fonts" are really swaps between separate Unicode characters, and those styled alphabets have gaps. When a character has no styled twin — accents, punctuation, a stray letter — the plain original passes through, so your text looks half-converted.
How Do You Convert Fancy Text Back to Normal?
Fancy Unicode text isn't formatting layered on top of letters — each 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 or 𝓼𝓬𝓻𝓲𝓹𝓽 glyph is a different character, so "paste as plain text" can't strip it. Retype it, or run it through an NFKC normalizer that folds most styled letters back to plain A–Z (a few decorative styles don't fold).
Get the next post.
Craft notes on writing for the internet. One short email, every other week. No spam.
BoldlyType is a free Unicode text formatter, and this blog is the part where we explain ourselves. It's a working notebook on writing for the internet: how text actually renders in the plain boxes you post into, how to format when the platform gives you no toolbar, and how to write captions, bios, and hooks that earn attention without sounding like a brand intern. Most of the answers here came from breaking things across LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Discord first, then writing down what survived. If you write in a box that only takes plain text, this is for you.
What this blog actually covers
Six topics, organized as pillars. Each one is a hub that collects every related guide in one place, so you can read down a single thread instead of hunting through the archive. A post usually does one of three jobs: it answers a specific question you'd type into a search bar ("how do I bold text on LinkedIn"), it teaches a writing skill (a hook formula, a bio structure), or it tells you the truth about a formatting trick before you lean on it.
The throughline is that formatting and writing aren't separate problems. A bold-text generator is useless if the words next to it are boring, and the best caption in the world dies if the line breaks collapse on mobile. We cover both halves because you need both halves.
Fonts & Fancy Text
The "how does this even work" pillar. Unicode "fonts" aren't real fonts — they're math-alphabet look-alike characters that your phone treats as bold or italic. This is where we explain what those styles are, why they sometimes show up as empty boxes on someone else's screen, and which ones travel well across platforms. If you've ever copied a fancy font and watched it break in someone's DMs, start here.
Pairs with the formatters at /text-generator, /bold-text-generator, and /italic-text-generator.
Platform Formatting How-Tos
Step-by-step recipes for platforms that don't give you a formatting toolbar. Bold and italic on LinkedIn, line breaks that don't collapse on Instagram, bullet points in a bio, monospace in Discord, structure in a WhatsApp broadcast. Each guide is the literal sequence of steps, not a lecture about why formatting matters.
Pairs with /linkedin-text-formatter, /instagram-text-formatter, and the rest of the tool pages.
Personal Branding
Personal branding is a writing problem before it's a design problem. This pillar covers the craft underneath a profile people actually follow: headlines, the first line of a post, bio architecture, and the unglamorous discipline of showing up consistently. No "build your empire" energy — just the sentences that do the work.
Aimed at anyone growing an audience under their own name: founders, freelancers, job-seekers, creators.
GenZ & Internet Writing
How to write in a voice that reads as genuinely online instead of a 38-year-old's impression of one. The lowercase aesthetic, when slang lands and when it's cringe, emoji used as punctuation, tone calibration per platform. The goal is fluency, not a costume — and knowing the difference is most of the skill.
Useful for brands trying not to sound like a brand, and for anyone whose audience can smell try-hard from three words in.
Captions, Hooks & Hashtags
The practical craft of the things that move the needle: scroll-stopping first lines, captions that hold a reader past the "…more" fold, hashtag strategy that isn't superstition, and bios that convert a profile visit into a follow. Formulas you can reuse, with examples, not vibes.
Pairs with the generators in /tools when you want to draft fast and refine.
Accessibility & Safe Formatting
The pillar where we tell you what the formatting tricks cost. Unicode bold and italic are look-alike characters, which means screen readers often mangle them — reading "𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱" as a string of unrelated symbol names, or skipping it entirely. Search engines and some platform algorithms don't always parse it as text either.
Our rule, repeated across these posts: use fancy formatting for emphasis and flourish, never for essential information. Your name, your call to action, your one important link — keep those in plain text. This pillar gives you the honest map of when a trick is harmless and when it quietly excludes part of your audience.
Who it's for, and where we stand
This is for creators, marketers, community managers, job-seekers, and anyone typing into a plain-text box that won't let them bold a single word. You don't need to be technical. You need to make text look intentional and read well in places that weren't designed to help you.
Editorially, two commitments. First, we're honest about Unicode's accessibility trade-offs even though our own tools generate it — the formatter is great for emphasis and bad for anything a screen reader needs to read aloud, and we'll keep saying so. Second, no growth-hack snake oil. No magic posting times, no engagement-pod gospel, no "this one trick." If something only works because an algorithm is having a weird week, it doesn't go in the blog. Everything here is curated and edited by Shreyas Bagal, who has spent the better part of a decade obsessing over how text renders across platforms — which is a strange thing to care about, and exactly why this site exists.