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Fancy Text Showing Boxes: Why It Happens

Fancy text showing boxes is a common problem: a style looks perfect on your screen and broken on someone else's. This guide explains why it happens and how to avoid it.

Last updated 4 min read

Key takeaways

  • A box or question mark means the reader's device has no font for that character. Your text itself is fine.
  • Common styles such as bold, italic and small caps are far safer than rare symbols.
  • Test a style on a second device, and keep the important words in plain letters.

Why You See Fancy Text Showing Boxes

Every character on a screen is drawn by a font. When a font does not contain a character, the device looks for another font that does. If it finds none, it draws a placeholder instead, often an empty rectangle, a rectangle with a cross, or a diamond with a question mark. People in typography sometimes call this placeholder "tofu", because of its blocky shape.

Fancy text depends on this system more than ordinary text does. Each styled letter is a separate Unicode character, and some of those characters are rare enough that not every device has a font for them. That is why fancy text showing boxes happens to some readers and not to others, even when they are looking at exactly the same message.

What Is Actually Going Wrong

The problem is almost never in the text. When you copy a styled word, the characters travel intact. What changes from one device to the next is the set of fonts available to draw them. Three situations account for most cases:

  • An older system. The device was released before some characters were added to Unicode, or it was never updated, so its fonts do not include them.
  • An app with its own font. Some apps use a fixed font and do not fall back to system fonts, which leaves gaps wherever that font is missing a character.
  • A conversion step. An email, a database or a message gateway may not store certain characters, and replaces them with a question mark or a diamond.

Which Styles Are Safer

Characters that have been in Unicode for a long time and are used in real writing tend to be better supported. Bold, italic and small-caps alphabets are drawn from sets that many fonts cover, and they are a sensible default. Rarer sets, such as blackletter, double-struck or enclosed letters, are drawn well on recent devices but may fail on older ones. Decorative symbols, flowers and arrows depend on the symbol fonts a device ships with, so they can differ from one phone to another.

Styles that add marks to your letters have their own risks. Strikethrough, underline and glitch text rely on combining marks, and some apps draw the line in the wrong place, shift it sideways or cut it off. These are worth testing in the exact field you want to use.

For a quiet, widely supported option, try the Small Caps Generator. For stronger emphasis, the Bold Text Generator is an easy choice.

A Quick Test Before You Post

  1. Send it to yourself first. Paste the text into a private note or a chat with yourself and look at it at normal size.
  2. Check a second device. A friend with a different phone, or a computer with a different operating system, will show you what many readers see.
  3. Check the exact field. A bio, a comment and a name field can all behave differently inside the same app.
  4. Check dark mode and small sizes. Thin styles can be hard to see in either.

How to Keep a Message Readable Anyway

Design the message so that it still works if the styled part disappears. Put the real information, such as a date, a place or a name, in plain letters, and use styled text for a heading or an accent. If a reader sees boxes where the styled word should be, they still understand the post.

  • Use one styled phrase instead of a whole paragraph.
  • Avoid styled text in links, addresses and anything someone may have to type.
  • Choose the same style across an account, so you only have to test once.
  • Keep a plain-text copy of anything important.

When Boxes Are Not About Fonts

If every character in a message looks like a box, including ordinary letters, the cause is different. The text may have been saved in the wrong encoding, or a website may be sending text without declaring that it uses Unicode. That is a technical problem on the site or app side, and you can usually do nothing about it other than reporting it.

Boxes are one of several limits of this kind of text. Our guide on how fancy fonts work explains the whole picture, and the guide on Fancy Text Accessibility: Screen Readers and Styled Letters covers what screen readers do with the same characters.

Try the Tools

  • Small Caps Generator

    Capital-shaped letters at lowercase height for a clean, formal look.

  • Bold Text Generator

    Serif bold, sans bold, bold italic and more heavy lettering.

Quick Answers

Is a box a sign that I copied the text wrong?

Usually not. The characters were copied correctly. The device showing them simply has no font that contains those characters, so it draws an empty placeholder.

Why do I see question marks instead of boxes?

Some apps replace characters they cannot store or display with a question mark. It is the same underlying problem, but the replacement happens in the app instead of on the screen.

Which styles are least likely to break?

Styles built from widely used alphabets, such as bold, italic and small caps, tend to be safer than rare ones. Even so, no style is guaranteed on every device, so test the ones you rely on.

Can I fix boxes on my own device?

Often updating the operating system or the app helps, because newer versions include more fonts. If an older device still shows boxes, the sender has to choose a simpler style.

Should I warn readers about missing characters?

You cannot control a reader's device, so the best protection is to keep the message readable without the styled part. Put the meaning in plain letters and use the styled text as decoration.