Articles researched and written by the Fonts Mania team. The staff byline covers work on Unicode and text encoding, typography on the web, and how search engines, language models and assistive technology handle written text. Where an article reports a measurement, the method and date are stated in the piece so it can be reproduced; where it makes a claim about a platform, that claim is checked against the platform on the date given. Corrections are handled under the editorial policy and noted on the article.
Articles
What Styled Unicode Costs a Language Model
The same eleven characters cost 2 tokens in plain text and 21 to 30 tokens in every decorative Unicode style we measured. An 80-character bio went from 20 tokens to 188. The mechanism is simple, and so is the fix.
Read the guide →How to Change the Font in Your Instagram Bio
Instagram gives you one font and 150 characters. Here is how people get around the first limit, what actually works in 2026, and the two mistakes that make a styled bio backfire.
Read the guide →Why Fancy Text Shows as Boxes (and How to Fix It)
You paste a style, it looks perfect, and someone replies that they see squares. Nothing is broken — here is the mechanism behind it, and how to choose styles that survive.
Read the guide →