Easy! Except that every programmer had their own 'codex'. And then you can transmit messages by sending zeros and ones. So one programmer might say '001' means 'A', '002' means 'B', and so on. These need to be somehow converted into something meaningful. At the lowest level, computers transmit voltages (low/high, zero/one). See, if you're a programmer, and you wanted your program to interface (connect to, or talk to) another program, then you need some sort of shared language. As computer usage increased, and as the early internet emerged, this became a problem. Typography was a well-established field, but it hadn't yet made its way past the type-writer and into the digital realm. In the early days of computing, there was no agreed-upon way of representing and rendering text in computer programs. Interested in how all this text font conversion stuff works? Let's take a dive into the origins of Unicode - the International not-for-profit organisation that creates the rules for how computers should convert binary (zeros and ones) into textual characters (like the ones you're reading now). They're actually different characters/symbols - not just different 'styles' or 'fonts'. Think of these bold characters as separate 'glyphs', just like 'A' is different to 'a', and '%' is different to '$'.

That's why it's possible to copy and paste them (something that you can't do with normal 'fonts'). The characters that are generated aren't actually a bold 'font', but rather a set of bold Unicode characters.

Hi there! Ever wondered how people make text bold on their social media posts/bios when there aren't any formatting buttons? Well, this little web app allows you to convert normal text into bold text that you can copy and paste into your social media posts/bio/etc.

Textify me