About the Twitter Italics Generator
X has never offered rich text in the compose box. Everything you send is stored as a plain string, so the only route to a slanted word is to use characters that were drawn slanted in the first place. This converter rewrites each letter as its italic counterpart, a trick the community has called twitalics for years.
Serif italic is the default here. Against the sans-serif interface font that X uses, the serif shapes stand out clearly, which is the whole point when you are marking a title or a wry aside. Sans italic is the discreet alternative that blends with the surrounding sentence, and both are also available with extra weight for headline style posts.
Practical limits are worth knowing before you post. Each italic letter is a supplementary plane character, which X counts as two toward the post limit, so an italic sentence eats through your allowance twice as fast. Post search matches literal characters too, meaning an italicised keyword will not surface in a search for the normal spelling, and hashtags stop working entirely once converted.
Alt text and screen reader behaviour vary. Some readers spell the letters out individually, so avoid italicising anything a reader must understand to follow the post.
For the same conversion aimed at a different network see Facebook Italics, and for weight instead of slant try Facebook Bold Text.
How to use
- Type the words you want slanted.
- Pick a Typeface; serif italic contrasts most with the X interface.
- Copy the italic text and paste it into your post, reply or bio.
- Keep hashtags and mentions in plain letters so they stay clickable.
Common questions
- Does italic text count double in the post limit?
- Effectively yes. These letters sit outside the basic multilingual plane, so X counts each one as two characters.
- Can I italicise a hashtag?
- You can, but it stops being a working hashtag. X only links the plain letter form.
- Why is it called twitalics?
- It is the community nickname for pasting Unicode italics into tweets, from the days before the platform was renamed X.
- Will italic text work in my display name?
- Yes. Display names accept these characters, though the handle itself is restricted to plain letters, numbers and underscores.