Instagram Fonts
Welcome to InstaFonts.io! We have over 90 bio fonts for you to make your bio all fancy like. You can copy and paste these text fonts and use them not just in your Instagram bio, but all over the internet! They're particularly useful on social media sites that don't allow you to format your text (e.g. bold, italics, underline, etc.). Using some bold text to, for example, punctuate important points in your post could help you draw readers attention to the important parts (skimming is the new "reading" in the internet age). Stylish text fonts like those of this website are also handy to just draw peoples' attention to your post/tweet/etc. in the first place. Insta Fonts was primarily designed to bring you fonts for your Instagram bio, but we hope you'll find it useful for other purposes too!
How does this work?
Here's the short explanation: Your keyboard is hiding characters from you. Your keyboard has only about 100 characters on it, but that's just because it can't fit any more. There are actually tens of thousands of characters! No joke. There were originally 128 characters (read about ASCII), but then Unicode was introduced and that supports an unlimited number of characters. Each year the Unicode standard grows to incorperate more characters - and emojis! That's right, emojis are actually just textual characters! It would be perfectly plausible to have a keyboard that had keys which were for emojis.
Okay, so there are a bunch more characters than the ones on your keyboard, but how do we generate bold/italic/fancy text that can be copy-pasted away from this site and into another one? Well, amongst these tens-of-thousands of other characters are actually whole character sets that look similar to the alphabet on your keyboard. Some of these character sets were added for mathematicians, linguists, and other academics who wanted to be able to express their equations and formulae in their emails to one another (emails didn't have formatting of text, originally), and other character sets were introduced for countries that required them to communicate (e.g. full-width latin characters to supplement the full-width Japanese characters). So that's how we ended up with all these funky text fonts. Of course, many of the above "fonts" aren't "proper" character sets - they were put together into a set that sort of resembles an alphabet.
Okay, now on to the long explanation: The long explanation starts with an international organisation called "Unicode". It's the organisation that handles the international standards for converting numbers into textual characters. Unicode was the solution to an increasingly important problem in the dawn of computing and the internet: How does my computer communicate with another computer on the other side of the world if that computer "speaks a different language"? One of the most popular "languages" in the early 1980s (especially in the USA) was ASCII - the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII was (and still is) just a simple set of conversion rules to go from numbers to characters. There were 128 characters in the original ASCII specification - and that's because 128 is the largest number that can be represented with 7 bits. But isn't it the case the computers tend to like groups of 8 bits (i.e. a "byte")? Yep, but the 8th bit was used for code pages - that is, the other 128 characters (128 + 128 = 256 = maximum number you can make from 8 bits) where used for domain-specific purposes. A business could use them for their own special encoding, or a whole country could use them for non-latin characters in their language. But there's lots of problems with this approach. Firstly, many languages (e.g. Chinese) have way more than 128 characters. Secondly, what if a person wants to be able to read/write a document that includes characters from two different code pages? We need more characters!
And here comes Unicode to solve all our problems. In the early 1980s a bunch of prominent computer scientists and engineers got together to try to solve this increasinly annoying problem. They invented an encoding that was backwards compatible with ASCII (an absolte must since no one wanted to re-write all their documents and programs to handle a new encoding). So this means that Unicode and the ASCII specifications are actually the exact same for the first 128 characters. Thus, a chain of Unicode-encoded numbers which represent the letters of the Latin alphabet (or any other characters in the first 128) could actually be read by a program that was designed to only read ASCII characters. But if the Unicode text had other characters (outside of the 0-127 range), then the ASCII-reader wouldn't understand it.
Okay, so how is this relevant to Instagram fonts? Well, Unicode was successful in launching an international standard for encoding an indefinitely large set of new characters. This meant that tens of thousands of new characters could be introduced - for every language and purpose that anyone could desire (including the modern-day needs of social media: emojis!). And this led to the introduction of many characters that, either by mistake or design, resembled the normal characters that you see on your keyboard. There are so many characters in Unicode that more "fancy text fonts" are being "discovered" all the time. You can simply browse through the Unicode characters and try to find interesting characters which look a bit like alphanumeric characters and then build your own "text font".
Are they actually "fonts"?
Well, not really. A font (or really, a "Typeface") is something that gets applied to regular characters like the ones you're reading right now. The font "transforms" the "style" of the characters, but doesn't change the actual characters at all. That's why you can't simply copy and paste the text you're reading right now into a social media website and expect the font to be "transferred" along with the characters. However, if you copy 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖙𝖊𝖝𝖙 then it will actually copy the "style" that those characters appear to have. That's because, as explained previously, those fancy character are actually separate characters rather than being the same characters with a particular "style" applied. The characters "e" and "𝖊" are as different as "S" and "5". They may appear similar, but they're completely different characters.
Which fonts will work in by bio?
Instagram has blocked certain characters from appearing in bios, and so you may find that some of these fonts don't work properly on Instagram. It's hard to keep track of which fonts are working and which ones aren't at any particular time, so we've included all of our fancy fonts and you can easily test them by just attempting to put them in your bio and seeing if it works. The same goes for if you're using these fancy fonts on Twitter, or Tumblr, or Amino, or Discord, or absolutely anywhere else. Whether or not a font works will simply depend on whether the developers of the platform have decided to ban the characters of the font.
Can I use these fonts on other social networks?
Yes! You can use them on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Amino, Discord, Spectrum, WhatsApp, WeChat, YouTube, QQ, SnapChat, Skype, VKontakte (VK), Pinterest, Taringa, and more! Basically, anywhere that you can publish text, there's a decent change that you can use these stylish text fonts to spruce up your posts. This site is called Insta Fonts simply because Instagram is one of the most widely used social media platforms. As I've noted above, some sites disallow certain Unicode characters, and so not all of these Unicode fonts will work on all sites.
Feedback
Got some feedback for the team? You can share it with us here. We'll do our best to incorperate your suggestions into the website on the next update. Thanks for visiting Insta Fonts!
Note: This homepage is actually just a place-holder. You'll soon be able to see many more fonts - all designed by people like you using our fancy font maker! :)