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Want to fancy up your tweets? This simple hack brings fun fonts to Twitter

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Before today, we had to take a page from of the Kanye West School of Capitalizing Everything if we wanted to emphasize something on Twitter. Or do *this* which is almost more annoying THAN THIS. Although Twitter let users tweet emojis, it didn’t offer options for switching up font size or underlining our most important tweets.

But no longer. Isaac Hepworth, who works on special projects at Twitter, unveiled the secret to spicing up your tweets with special characters.

Screen Shot 2013-08-14 at 3.39.08 PM
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Hepworth linked to a Unicode text converter, and it makes putting tweets into special characters extremely easy. Just type the tweet into the converter and it will show all of the options, which include basics like bold, italics, and script, as well as more unusual choices like Faux Cyrillic and upside-down text. You then just copy and paste the sentence or phrase into your Twitter text box, and there you have it: fancy tweets.

So now your tweets can look like this: Screen Shot 2013-08-14 at 3.47.41 PM

Or even this:Screen Shot 2013-08-14 at 3.41.46 PM

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But not everyone is enthusiastic about this development.

Screen Shot 2013-08-14 at 3.41.17 PMScreen Shot 2013-08-14 at 3.40.47 PMScreen Shot 2013-08-14 at 3.40.25 PM

And they might have a point – some of these font options are genuinely helpful, like italics, but a lot of them are kind of annoying to look at. And we all know that giving users free reign over design can turn a social network into an aesthetic terrorscape (cough, MySpace, cough) so this might end up making Twitter uglier.

Then again, people who are really bothered by users who tweet in fancy characters can just block them and keep their Twitter experience old school, so who cares?

As long as they don’t make a Comic Sans option, it’ll be OK.

Twitter, which started as a small project for the employees of the small podcasting company Odeo, has taken the world by storm, gaining more than 300 million users since its inception in early 2006. The popular social networking website and micro-blogging service allows users to post their latest updates in a quick, burst-like fashion of 140 characters or less and it has become the arena for worldwide conversations. World leaders use Twitter. The PGA Tour has streamed live on Twitter. Fans give opinions on albums seconds after they are released on Twitter. For all the info you’ll need — including quick steps, pointers, and tidbits explaining how to use Twitter like a social media boss — check out our complete user guide to Twitter.

Kate Knibbs
Former Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
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