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Instagram Fonts

Welcome! This site allows you to generate text fonts that you can copy and paste into your Instagram bio. It's useful for generating Instagram bio symbols to make your profile stand out and have a little bit of individuality. After typing some text into the input box, you can keep clicking the "show more fonts" button and it'll keep generating an infinite number of different Instagram font variations, or you can use one of the "tried and true" fonts like the cursive text, or the other stylish text fonts - i.e. the ones that are a bit "neater" than the others because they use a set of symbols that are closer to the normal alphabet, and are more consistent in their style.

The site works by generating a bunch of different styles using a large range of different Unicode characters. So technically you're not actually generating fonts, but instead I guess you could say you're generating Instagram-compatible Unicode glyphs :) Want to learn more about Unicode? Read on...

Unicode

Computers must store all data in a binary format - that is, with zeros and ones. So each letter that you're reading right now is stored on my server as a series of zeros and ones. That needs to go from my server to your browser, and your browser needs to understand what those zeros and ones are referring to.In the early days of computing, everyone had their own ideas about which binary codes should refer to which textual characters - there was no universal standard saying 01100001=a, 01100010=b, etc., but that changed in the 1980s with the formation of Unicode. Unicode is an international standards body that works towards a universal specification for text characters. Before Unicode was formed, everyone had their own ways of storing and rendering text, and so whenever two programs from different programmers or organisations had to "talk" to one another, they'd have to build a "translator" so that they could understand which codes referred to which textual characters.

Unicode had a bit of a tough time though, because all the different organisations didn't want to change their whole system around just to comply with this new spec. So Unicode had to introduce a bunch of different symbol sets to support legacy systems. Over time, the number of symbols grew into the tens of thousands, and today we're moving into the hundreds of thousands. Emojis are also text symbols, and so the new emojis that are appearing all the time are coming out of the Unicode working group.

So that's how we ended up with such a large and strange/fun array of symbols, and that's the reason you're here! I've put together a bunch of fonts for Instagram that should be fund to play with and use for your bio. You may want to mix and match certain parts from different fonts.

Text Fonts or Text Symbols?

ASCII characters are the first 128 symbols of Unicode, and these are the things that you're reading right now. But there are far more than 128 symbols in Unicode, and it just so happens that there are quite a few that look a bit like the normal Latin alphabet (i.e. that look like English text). We can take advantage of that to make "pseudo-alphabets" which resemble normal ASCII text, but which have certain differences - such as being bolder, or italic, or even upside down! These "alphabets" often aren't perfect - they're basically "Unicode hacks" which take advantage of various symbols from different sets all throughout the 100k+ symbols in the standard.

The term "font" actually refers to a set of graphics that correspond to some or all of the Unicode glyphs. You've probably heard of "Comic Sans" and "Arial" - these are fonts. What you're copying and pasting above are actually symbols that exist in every font. So the cursive text and other fancy letters that you're seeing above are actually separate character, just like "a" and "b" are separate characters.

Copy and Paste

So why doesn it matter that they're separate characters? Who cares? Well, you do! Because if they weren't (i.e. if they were just normal fonts), then you wouldn't be able to copy and paste them! You can't copy and paste some Comic Sans into your Instagram bio because the symbols the you'd be copying would just be normal ASCII characters, and the fact that they're rendered in one font on one website doesn't mean that they'll appear as that same font on another - it's up to the website owner to decide what fonts they use on their website. However, if there's a set of unicode characters that looks like a specific font, or has a particular style (e.g. bold, italic, cursive, etc.), then we can use them to "emulate" a font that will work across different websites when you copy and paste those "fonts".

So really, if I were to be really pedantic, this site should be called "pseudo instagram fonts". But the current name gets the point across, and it's nice and short :) So, anyway, that's why you're able to copy and paste these fonts into Instagram.

Compatability

One final note: You may notice that some of the fonts don't work on Instagram. Unfortunately Instagram filters out some of the fancy letters and symbols - probably because they don't want people to abuse certain Unicode stuff like the excessive diacritics used in the "glitch text" font that you'll see in the list.

Okay, that's all for now folks! I hope you find all these Instagram fonts useful! You can keep clicking that "show more" button, and it'll keep randomizing all the different symbol alphabets all day long. If you have a stylish text font that you've created, or you want to share some feedback, please share it here. I'm always playing around building new websites, so if you've got any other ideas for text generators or text fonts, feel free to share those too. 𝒯𝒽𝒶𝓃𝓀𝓈 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓅𝓅𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒷𝓎! ٩( ᐛ )و