How it works
This monospace text generator swaps each letter and digit for a fixed-width character from Unicode's mathematical alphabets. It holds 72 characters and no punctuation, so a comma stays as typed. Some apps strip or block these characters, and screen readers may read them badly.
Read the full guide
One typewriter row, one wide row
The large card sets your line in Monospace, digits included. Spaces and punctuation stay as typed. Full width (vaporwave) sits below: Unicode's other fixed-width alphabet, and the one with a space, a colon and brackets of its own.
Why the columns may drift
Unicode has 62 monospace characters, 52 letters and ten digits, added in March 2001 for mathematics. It has no monospace space, comma or bracket. Those come from the app's own font at their own widths, so a table typed this way may not line up. The reader's font also decides how wide each letter is drawn.
Tips
- Small l and digit one are separate characters. Unicode's chapter on them warns that some monospaced fonts draw the pair alike.
- The table ends with ten seven-segment digits to tap. They date from March 2020, so older devices show empty boxes.
- Each character counts as two where a box counts UTF-16 units, so a 20-letter line can use 40.
Questions and answers
Where do the monospace characters come from?
Each letter becomes a character with monospace in its name, such as Mathematical monospace small a, U+1D68A, from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. The seven-segment digits come from Symbols for Legacy Computing. No font is involved: a font cannot travel with pasted text.
What does monospace mean?
Every character takes the same width. Wikipedia's article on monospaced fonts gives fixed-pitch, fixed-width and non-proportional as other names, and records that such fonts are customary on typewriters and for setting computer code.
Should I use this or a code block?
A code block, wherever the box offers one. In Markdown, a backtick each side makes a code span. HTML has code for a fragment of computer code and samp for a program's output. Text set that way stays ordinary letters, so a search finds it.
Why did my text turn back to plain letters?
Every character here carries a mapping to its plain letter in Unicode's database. Software that tidies text with the normalization called NFKC applies that mapping, and π becomes a again. The words survive. The look does not.