Why Markdown Cannot Bold a Name
Discord parses **two asterisks** only inside message content. A display name, a nickname or a channel title is stored as a plain string, so the parser never runs on it and the asterisks would show up literally. Substituting the letters themselves is the only way to get weight into those fields.
Six Families, Three Trade-offs
The bold block contains a serif variant, a sans-serif variant, italic variants of each, and script and Fraktur variants. They differ in more than appearance: the serif and sans sets include a complete digit range, while some of the decorative sets have gaps that fall back to ordinary glyphs.
- Serif bold carries small feet on its capitals and reads like a book title at larger sizes.
- Sans bold has uniform strokes and holds up best in a compact member list.
- Bold italic adds slant, which costs a little clarity in exchange for energy.
- Script and Fraktur bold mix weight with ornament and are the least predictable across fonts.
Before You Paste It
Bold code points are among the oldest additions in this part of Unicode, so coverage on current Windows, macOS, iOS and Android builds is broad. The practical constraint is length: a display name or nickname is capped at 32 characters, and the preview counter counts code points, not what you see on screen. Search and mentions match exact code points too, so a fully bold name will not match someone typing the plain spelling. For bold text inside a message, the built-in markdown remains the better tool.
To compare a family with thinner strokes, the cursive text converter puts the script variants side by side.
Each family below has its own page with coverage notes and a character counter. The main converter shows all of them at once if you would rather compare across families.