How it works
This math sans generator is a sans font generator for plain text: it swaps each letter and digit for its upright sans-serif character from Unicode's mathematical alphabets. Punctuation stays as typed. Some apps strip or block these characters, and screen readers may read them badly.
Read the full guide
Upright first, bold and italic below
The large card is Sans-serif, the upright alphabet with its ten digits. Sans bold and Sans italic follow as rows of their own. Unicode has no sans-serif italic digits, so a number in that row stays plain. Where the text around your line is already sans-serif, the upright row is hard to tell from ordinary letters.
Letters made for equations
Unicode's chapter on these characters says mathematics needs several alphabets that look like mere font variations of one another, yet mean different things in one document. That is why each alphabet has code points of its own. All 62 arrived in Unicode 3.1, in March 2001.
- Small l and capital I can look alike here. Unicode's own chapter warns that not all sans-serif fonts tell them apart.
- A box that counts in UTF-16 units charges two for each of these, so twenty letters cost forty.
- An accented letter keeps its accent: the letter is swapped and the mark goes back on top.
Questions and answers
What is math sans?
The sans-serif alphabet in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block: capitals from U+1D5A0, small letters from U+1D5BA and digits from U+1D7E2. Unicode's table of mathematical styles lists it as sans-serif, Latin and digits.
Why does it look like normal text?
Where an app's own font is sans-serif, these letters look much the same. They are different characters all the same: capital A here is U+1D5A0, not U+0041, which a search or a spell-checker will notice.
Can software turn it back into plain letters?
Yes. Each of the 62 has a compatibility decomposition to its plain letter or digit, so text tidied with the normalization called NFKC is folded back. Unicode notes that folding loses the distinction the characters were encoded for.
Are there sans-serif Greek letters?
Only in bold. Unicode's table gives sans-serif bold Latin, Greek and digits, and sans-serif bold italic Latin and Greek. The upright and the italic sans-serif alphabets are Latin alone.